The Beatitudes: The Biblical Pattern of Christian Experience

In our introductory article, I sought to convey to you that the Beatitudes, and particularly the first seven Beatitudes, provide us with God’s precise and profound description of His people as well as their experience. Since these characteristics proceeded from the very lips of God, in the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ, we may know with absolute certainty that this description of the citizens of God’s kingdom, of true Christians, is a perfect, a complete, a sequential, a cumulative, a balanced, a God-focused, as well as a trustworthy description. In other words, in these seven Beatitudes Christ provides us with the premier touchstone for Christian experience which will enable us, as no other passage of Scripture, to distinguish between genuine and counterfeit Christian experience, between that experience which is the fruit of the Holy Spirit’s saving work and that experience which is of our own making.

With that perspective let us now focus on the first of these seven Beatitudes in which Christ pronounces the spiritually poor to be supremely happy, and simultaneously identifies them as citizens of His Kingdom. Considering that the Beatitudes are recorded in a sequential and cumulative order, it must at once be evident that it is both noteworthy and significant that Christ presents poverty of spirit as the first experiential characteristic of His people. For this means that the experience of poverty of Spirit is the initial and foundational experience of God’s children and therefore the fundamental mark of the Holy Spirit’s saving work. Wherever and whenever God glorifies His saving work in the hearts of fallen sinners, the experiential recognition of this poverty of Spirit will always be the initial evidence that God indeed has begun a good work in the heart of a fallen son or daughter of Adam. The rationale for this conclusion will become evident as we examine the terminology Christ uses in this first Beatitude.

Definition of the terms “poor” and “spirit”

In Greek there are two words which we translate as “poor.” The first of these is the word “penichros,” which refers to the state of poverty in a general sense. However, the second word “ptochos” refers to poverty in the absolute sense of the word. It is used to describe people who are conspicuously poor, who are utterly bereft of all material possessions, and who are at the same time powerless to change their condition. In other words, it refers to a beggar who in the most literal sense of the word does not have a penny to his name, and who completely lacks the resources to deliver himself from his state of poverty. It is therefore of fundamental importance that Christ uses this latter word, the word “ptochos,” when He speaks of the “poor in spirit.”

What is of significance, however, for this Beatitude as well as those that follow, is that Christ identifies this poverty as spiritual poverty. In other words, Christ is not referring to the poor men and women of this world who are destitute of temporal goods. Such is the mistaken notion of those who promote the gospel as a social gospel and who are very keen on using both the Beautitudes and the entire Sermon on the Mount for that purpose. However, Christ, in giving a description of the citizens of His kingdom, as well as articulating the constitution of that kingdom, establishes from the very outset that His kingdom is a spiritual kingdom, a kingdom which is not of this world (John 18:36), a kingdom of which He testified in response to the demand of the Pharisees when the kingdom of God should come, that, “the kingdom of God cometh not with observation:… for behold the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:20,21). For this reason He adds the word “pneuma,” which in Scripture refers both to the Holy Spirit as well as (which is the case here) to the spiritual, inner dimension of man.

Christ, therefore, here identifies as citizens of His kingdom men and women who are experientially conscious of the absolute poverty of the spiritual, inner dimension of their existence, who are conscious of the fact that spiritually they are utterly destitute, as well as powerless and helpless to bring about a change in this condition. Christ calls such sinners blessed, which means negatively that without this experiential consciousness of our spiritual bankruptcy, we will never experience true blessedness or happiness, nor may we consider ourselves citizens of God’s kingdom.

Poverty of Spirit is the initial and foundational experience of God’s children and therefore the fundamental mark of the Holy Spirifs saving work.

Parenthetically, I wish to state here that the word “blessed” which Christ uses to introduce each Beatitude, refers not to a happiness which is related to and is the result of external circumstances and/or events, but to a happiness which proceeds from within, which clearly is in harmony with the spiritual meaning of each Beatitude. A more thorough explanation of this word will be given, the Lord willing, upon conclusion of our consideration of each individual Beatitude.

The reason for Christ’s selection of the recognition of spiritual poverty as the initial and foundational mark of the true Christian and his experience, will become evident when we examine this Beatitude within the context of the entire Word of God.

This Beatitude examined within the context of Scripture

Since God’s great objective in redeeming fallen sinners is the restoration of what we have ruined in our deep fall, we must of necessity go to Paradise in order to gain a proper understanding of this Beatitude. To state it differently, the beginning of the Beatitudes leads us to the very beginning of the Word of God, to the very beginning of human existence.

In Genesis 2:7 God’s Word records for us that sacred and profound moment when it pleased Jehovah, the Creator of heaven and earth, to create the crown jewel of His creation, namely His image-bearer Adam. This momentous event is described as follows, “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”

As we know, God created Adam in a manner which was distinctly different from the rest of creation. Instead of bringing Adam into existence by means of a verbal command as He did with the rest of creation, He chose instead to personally craft Adam’s body from the dust of the ground. Why this significant difference? The reason for this difference is directly related to the purpose for which God created Adam. It was God’s eternal good pleasure to create man to be the bearer of His image and to be the temple of His Spirit. It was the eternal desire of a triune God to exist in covenant relationship, in intimate, spiritual fellowship with His image-bearer, and therefore it pleased Him to make Adam the very dwelling-place of His Spirit. Therefore, when God crafted Adam’s body from the dust of the earth, He was in the most literal sense of the word building a temple for Himself. As was true for both the tabernacle and the temple which God filled with His divine presence upon completion, in like manner God filled Adam with His divine presence when He completed the formation of His body. This is the profound dimension of Genesis 2:7, for when Jehovah breathed the breath of life into Adam, God breathed His Spirit into Adam, and he became a living soul, i.e., he became the temple of the Holy Ghost.

The indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit was therefore Adam’s, and in him, man’s unspeakable wealth before the fall. In Adam we had God Himself as our portion, as it pleased the magnificent God of the universe, whom the very heavens cannot contain, to dwell in him by His Spirit. Human words therefore utterly fail as we attempt to describe the unspeakable and unsearchable riches we had before we fell.

In our fall we did not lose just something; we lost everything; we lost God!

However, human words are equally inadequate to describe what we lost in the wilful, wretched fall of our covenant head Adam. For we did not merely lose our residence in the Garden of Eden, our happiness, as well as everlasting life; indeed, we lost all that, but all of this was merely the consequence of the ultimate loss, namely the unspeakable loss of the indwelling presence of our Creator! Therefore, in our fall we did not lose just something; no, we lost everything; we lost God! In that one wretched moment from being rich in the absolute sense of the word, we became poor in the absolute sense of the word. From that wretched moment on, Adam — and we in him — was without God and without hope in the world. This, my dear reader, is the very essence of our fallenness, is the very essence of our spiritual poverty, is the dreadful result of the breach of our covenant relationship with God, namely the absence of the Spirit of God. From magnificent temples of the Holy Ghost, adorned with the image of a triune God, we became the wretched synagogues of Satan; from living souls we became souls dead in trespasses and sins. All our misery as sinners is a direct result of this tragic reality.

Holy Importunity

Lord, I cannot let Thee go,
Till a blessing Thou bestow;
Do not turn away Thy face,
Mine’s an urgent pressing case.

Dost Thou ask me who lam?
Ah, my Lord, Thou know’st my name;
Yet the question gives a plea
To support my suit with Thee.

Thou didst once a wretch behold,
In rebellion blindly bold,
Scorn Thy grace, Thy power defy:
That poor rebel, Lord, was I.

Once a sinner near despair
Sought Thy mercy-seat by prayer;
Mercy heard and set him free;
Lord, that mercy came to me.

Many days havepass’d since then,
Many changes I have seen;
Yet have been upheld till now:
Who could hold me up but Thou?

Thou hast help’d in every need,
This emboldens me to plead;
After so much mercy past,
Canst Thou let me sink at last?

No—I must maintain my hold,
‘Tis Thy goodness makes me bold;
I can no denial take,
When I plead for Jesus’ sake.

— John Newton, 1779

Battel Elshout is laboring as evangelist-elder in the Denver, Colorado area on behalf of the Netherlands Reformed Congregations.

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