It's good to see you all here this morning. It's been a very busy week, the past week for me, getting the marks in for two courses, about 90 people. And I want to thank Margie Michaels and Tomi Adeoye and Hanyel Jayakumar for helping me to do some of the marking on the questions that did not require too much judgment. It was enjoyable to spend some time with the three of them, especially Tomi and Hanyel.
And looking at what students with three years of engineering education had put down on paper, Tomi, Tomi and Hanyel frequently couldn't avoid bursting out laughing. Although Tomi did it in a very lady-like restrained giggle, whereas Hanyel, I thought he was going to fall off his chair at one point. It was nice to work with them. Again, I tend to be a bad advertisement for my employer.
I apologize for that. I have reverted in my preparations to thoughts pertaining to, in fact, what we have been going through in ESL for about the past month. I have spoken on the Beatitudes before. And I'm going to speak on the Beatitudes again.
I believe that the Beatitudes are a very deep, broad, and rich well of spiritual truth. Shall we turn to the Lord in prayer? Our Father in heaven, we thank you that you have made us your own. We thank you that we have the truth of your word before us and with us, and that we can go back to it and go back to it to find guidance and encouragement and direction.
May we consider your word well this morning, and may it indeed cause us to be strengthened in our walks. We pray in Jesus' name, amen. I tend to read the Bible in multiple versions. I tend to read both the Psalms and the Beatitudes in the King James.
And one of the words that we have, of course, in the King James with regard to the Beatitudes and how they begin in chapter five is blessed. Can you translate from English into English anything that does a better job than the word blessed? Because I can't. There is an aspect of the concept of blessedness, which is simply a spiritual concept.
Is it the same as happy? No, it is not the same thing as happy. It has light within it, within the word itself. And the aspects of blessedness are surprising, surprising.
I'm put in mind of the title of a book by DB Craybill, called The Upside Down Kingdom. That's the name of a book that is entirely occupied with the Sermon on the Mount, The Upside Down Kingdom. That's the most interesting. That's very interesting.
Why might it be called that by DB Craybill? I think because the value system that is taught to the child of God is opposite and upside down and inside out and backwards in every way, in every way, different than the value system that we get from the world, every single day. These chapters, Matthew 5 to 7, I believe they also very much play a role in conviction of sin, in conviction of sin. We come to the teachings of Christ and an audience of Jews.
And within that audience are learned people, learned religious establishment type of people. And they're quite convinced that they've got it nailed. The Newfoundland expression would be they've got it scald. They've got it all under control.
They've got it all figured out that the law is well within their ability to be satisfied by human will and human effort. And like no other passage perhaps in the New Testament, Matthew 5 to 7 put the lie to that. That there is so much more to the nature of purity, holiness, righteousness as defined by God, as revealed by Jesus Christ. That you would walk away from that hillside, realizing how profoundly deficient you are when it comes to the righteousness and holiness of God.
There is a built-in incompetence in us. I built in deficiency within us. That is very serious and very profound. It is in our very being.
And that is a very serious situation. It is one thing to point out symptoms. It is another thing to reveal, for God to reveal to you, to you yourself, how profoundly unholy you are and how incompetent you are and how mentally deficient you are when it comes to reaching for heaven and the things of God and finding salvation. That is a very, very sobering and necessary experience for everyone.
And so these chapters will engender a sense of inadequacy, even incompetence and a recognition that we live hour by hour, day by day, as ongoing failures as far as the holiness of God is concerned. The proud man cannot endure that kind of talk. The religious establishment could not endure that kind of talk. They, eventually, with the help of the Romans, executed the speaker of the Sermon on the Mount.
They crucified the Lord Jesus Christ. We might also say that in going through these three chapters, which I would encourage you to do again on your own, that there are things on offer. There are things on offer in the broader plan of God, but there are also things on offer to you, to you. The first thing is what is on offer is to take on the Lord Jesus as your personal King.
He speaks of the kingdom of God. He speaks from a point from a position of authority. He is King Jesus. He is speaking about your membership or non-membership in that kingdom.
On offer is for you to personally take on Jesus as your personal, your own King, of your own heart, of your own soul, of your own life, of your future. That is on offer. Also on offer is the fact that he is the Messiah. He is the promised one.
This Jewish audience would have been listening, many of them, to the Torah being read and the law and the prophets and the writings, as they would call them, week Saturday, after Saturday, after Saturday, under a prescribed reading program from the time that they were small. That's a commendable thing to be exposed to the Word of God once a week. What does it mean? Where does it point to the Lord Jesus Christ?
The short answer is everywhere. It is throughout the Old Testament. The arrows, the signs, the indications are all there. And you would be exposed to these things week after week, such as the audience of Jews.
Not all of them would have been so observant. But what is also on offer here is Jesus as the promised Messiah, the promised one. Yeshua, Mashiach, the promised Savior. And thirdly, something that is for the future.
We believe that the Lord Jesus will personally return and set up a millennial kingdom, and that he will rule with the rod of iron. But I believe that he will also rule with the love and grace that we know to be part of his character. In other words, he will rule on this planet, personally and perfectly. We live in an age where there is great expectations of the power and goodness of government.
Part of my purpose this morning is to say, stop thinking that way. The ultimate and only perfect King is Jesus Christ. And he will come back. He alone has the power and the wherewithal to do it, to do the thing that we all look forward to.
If he is King of your own heart, then you would welcome that. You would welcome that. I would submit to you as you read through the Sermon on the Mount Matthew 5 through 7, that there are three realms, perhaps, if I can use the word realm, myself and God, us and God, you and God. Important consideration.
It's the starting point you see. There's no point in talking about government. There's no point in talking about your neighbor. If you aren't right with God, if you aren't right with God, the rest of it is academic in the worst sense of the word.
It is moot. If you are not right with God, nothing can be right. And so the Christian's perspective on society and government and neighbor and these things is, well, let's go to the root of the problem. Where's the root of the problem?
It's right here. It's right here. That's the start. That's the root.
That's the place where we must start. We need to be right with God, our relationship with God. The second one was the source of great debate and discussion amongst the religious establishment. And that is your relationship between you, you might say and the people that you know.
I'm sure you know a lot of people. You may or may not know your next door neighbor very well. I am acquainted with the people that live on this side of me. And on that side of me, my wife is quite well acquainted with the lady who lives on that side, who went to high school with Clyde Renard.
And the young couple that just bought the house to the left of us, I've had two conversations with them. They bought the house about a year ago. And I'm just saying that there are people like my colleague at work who has been a loyal friend. He has a devout Muslim.
He has been a loyal friend to me since 1993. And he is in my office basically every single day for a chat. I know him very well. He's been in my home.
We have walked together. It is good to get to know people. So we have all kinds of so-called neighbors. We have all kinds of people that we know to varying degrees.
What is our relationship supposed to be with these people? Good question. The Pharisees like to say, we want to cut it with a knife and measure it with a micrometer. And sort of say, nope, yes.
And that sort of simplifies everything. That is not what the Lord Jesus taught. Furthermore, we would go further and say, well, in light of the above, what might our relationship be with society? And increasingly, I think that in Canada, when we think of society, we think of government.
We think too much about government, in a sense. We look to the government for too much. What should our relationship be with Canada, with society? How shall we function?
That is less clear from the Sermon on the Mount. I will make reference to Romans 13. It is interesting that the writer of the book of James, who might have been the half-brother of the Lord Jesus Christ, made reference in a certain way to the Beatitudes. He said that it is a royal law.
That's a lovely phrase, royal law. The law that comes from God through the Lord Jesus Christ is indeed a royal law. It has such power and loveliness and depth and profundity. It is indeed a royal law.
This James is writing to believers. Do the 10 commandments apply to you? Well, yes, of course they do. Are you in the habit of stealing?
I'm not in the habit of stealing. Does that then mean good? I'm fine. I'm well in there.
Are you kidding? The standards of the Lord Jesus Christ are so much higher than that. They are the royal law. And thus the writer James refers to them and uses the same wording that you can find in Matthew to love thy neighbor as thyself.
I think looking at Matthew 19 and Matthew 22, which is outside of our passage today. But that should be quite sobering, shouldn't it? Does love govern your life? Does love govern your motivations and your thinking?
I'm afraid that all too often the kinds of things that are exactly the opposite of love govern our hearts and minds and our thinking and our actions. And we realize that before God, we are anything but fit. Anything but love is from God, as John wrote in his epistle. The upside downness of this kingdom gets off to a very clear start.
I remember once there was a young lady who did become a believer. I've told you about her a bit before. She had to break up with her non-Christian boyfriend to the dismay of her parents. And she sat on that piano bench in my living room.
And she said, if I become a Christian, will things get better for me? I said, Jenny, they may well get worse. There is no such guarantee in your Bible. At the moment, you become a Christian.
You can never get cancer or have a car accident or have trouble in a relationship. There is no such thing. By coming to the principles of the scriptures, by placing your being and your soul in your mind under their governance, things may begin to go worse for you from an earthly point of view. And when we come to the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, we read things that are rather disturbing, that are rather upside down.
Because do you want to be poor in spirit? Do you want to mourn? Do you want to be meek? Do you want to hunger and thirst?
How do all those things sound to you? Do they sound like fun? This is sobering. Last on Friday evening, a man with a PhD in biochemistry in the ESL said, you know, these sorts of things don't increase your popularity.
Jesus was not interested in being popular, was he? He was interested in what is true for you and for me. That is what's important. When it comes to holiness and salvation and seeing the kingdom of God, fun is not part of the equation, necessarily.
Blessedness, a joy and peace and faith and love, they are part of the equation. But some of the other things that we might point to don't sound like much fun. So this is a prelude to the offers. When I look at these aspects, I've added some things in italics there.
In terms of the three realms, with regard to you and God, I think the human tendency is let us make God as small as possible because a small God is not very troublesome. But a God that looks inside your heart, that God is troublesome. So let us make him small because then we don't have to worry about him quite so much. With regard to yourself and your neighbor, I think we prefer to define that as conveniently as possible.
And in that we are not very different than the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the teachers of the law, and the scribes. If our neighbor would cause us inconvenience, perhaps he isn't our neighbor after all. What about ourselves and society and government? I think the human tendency is that we would prefer a society be managed by a big and beneficent government, one that cares for the other person, so that I don't have to.
In Romans 13, I'll just without turning to it this morning at 5 to 12, you have the teaching by the Apostle Paul. And he uses the image of the sword of government. And he teaches you in Romans 13, essentially, stay out of the swing of the sword of government. If you think that because you are a Christian and you know something about a royal law and you function according to higher principles, good, God bless you, that somehow that you are immune to being punished for breaking the law, think again.
That is foolish thinking. Is it not? Of course it is. Stay out of the swing of the sword of the government.
How far? Well, for example, says Paul, pay your taxes. Because if you don't pay your taxes, you are walking into the swing of the sword of the government. And that's true in Canada today.
Is it not? But on the other hand, I submit to you that it wasn't in Paul's wildest imagination, that he would be instructing Christians to entrust their children to indoctrination by the government in an educational system managed by an atheist government. Would Paul have said, go for it. entrust your children to an atheist government in an educational system that could not be more anti-god?
I don't think so. Did Paul in his wildest imagination imagine a health care system that people blindly obey? There was no health care system. Paul's writings in Romans 13 pertain to law and order.
And he points out that throughout human history, effectively, God sets up governments to keep law and order and prevent chaos. So if I break into your house and take stuff, I'm just as likely to end up in jail today as I was 2,000 years ago. And that is good. That is good.
We don't want people breaking into other people's houses and taking their stuff. Basic, basic law and order is what is in view in Romans 13. And so we should back off. I would suggest to you, Christian, in our thinking as to how much we want to trust government, especially government that has departed so very, very far away from the principles of God.
First of all, you and God, these are selected verses from the Beatitudes mostly. How do you like this? Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God. Right away, we should think how pure is my heart.
Can you say, well, it's a gray zone. If you start talking about a gray zone, I don't think you know the meaning of the word pure. My heart isn't. If I'm honest, my heart isn't pure by the standards of a person.
And that person is Jesus Christ of Nazareth, who committed no sin, who did no sin, and in him was found no sin. That kind of purity. No. No, that is not my purity.
That is not what I know about my own heart. But I want to see God, by the way. I do, yes, I do. Oh, yes, I do.
But my heart's not pure. Well, I have a problem, don't I? We have going back to before I read verse 28. Again, the heart, the heart, the heart.
You go back to verse 22. Do you set someone to nothing? You know what he said is not important. Because he's an idiot.
He's an idiot. Raka, contempt for the other. Really? Jesus said, you are in danger of hell.
What? Do you set another human being created in the image of God at a nothing, at a contempt? He's nothing but a contempt. He's nothing but a raka.
Oh, dear. The next thing that comes from that, as you can read, is, hatred. You said nothing but nothing. The next thing you find yourself hating him.
And what comes after hatred? The Lord knew all too well. Murder. This world is full of murder.
It is full of killing. It is full of avarice and greed. And these things come from the human heart. Lust, the trade, and even girls, the trade, and human beings.
It boggles the imagination. The evil that people can engage in. Because their hearts are so profoundly black and unpure, very impure. Where does it start?
Where does such incredible sin start? Oh, the Lord Jesus knew. He tells you straight up. From your heart, it gets going in your heart.
And evil can take on a life of its own in your heart. And you act on it, and it gets worse. And you act on it, and it gets worse. I knew of a friend who went to see a psychiatrist.
He had problems with anger. You know what the psychiatrist told him? This was out in Manitoba. The psychiatrist told him, you know what you need to do?
When you feel angry, you need to curse and curse and curse until you can't curse anymore and get it out of your system. From the psychiatrist, my goodness me. What kind of advice is that? Let sin run crazy in your heart.
Feel yourself with anger and hatred. Well, let's see where that goes. From a psychiatrist. Oh, dear.
These verses in the Sermon on the Mount, I think we can say that they are their spiritual truths. But I also like to say that they are spiritual laws. There is an inescapability to these things. Do you realize that?
You can't escape these truths. You may think you can escape these truths. You cannot escape these truths. If your heart has a treasure, which is an ungodly treasure, that is where it will reside.
You can't escape it. If you think that you can have that treasure on one side and God on the other side, it is a spiritual law, according to the person who taught this, who is Jesus Christ of Nazareth, that it is impossible to do that, because you cannot have two masters in your heart. You will effectively make a choice. Later in Matthew, we read the necessity of love.
And where does love begin? It begins with God. We are talking about our relationship with God. And love begins with God.
Jesus said unto that man thou shalt love the Lord thy God, with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. And then he was hard pressed to think of an answer to that one, because it is not within the human heart to love God with the mind and the heart and the soul. Every minute and every hour and every day, that is not our orientation. But that is the teaching.
That is the teaching from the law, the Torah, and from the Lord Jesus Christ. This should be very sobering to us. Another way in which we are deficient is that we are deficient in our imagination. We don't know what hell is like.
I think of the Lord Jesus. I think of a man God incarnate who knew more than anybody on that hill what hell was and is. A man who would love for the people listening to him to grasp the awfulness of hell. How can they be made to grasp it?
Because they don't. If they knew what it was like, they would be prepared to pull out their eye or cut off their hand. They most certainly would. The reason they aren't and we aren't is because we don't know what hell is.
We have no idea. And that, unfortunately, is a serious, serious deficiency. If we had any concept of what hell was like, we would run to God. And we don't.
We don't. We don't have the imagination. We don't have the knowledge. We don't have the will.
We are deficient in so many ways when it comes to the kingdom of God and finding salvation by ourselves. We are also needful when it comes to thinking about the future. When the Lord Jesus said that the false teachers would come at the beginning of chapter seven and that you would know them by their fruit and so on, you then come to the remedy. And the remedy is this.
Therefore, whoever here at these things of mind and doeth it, that's it right there. There will be people around you, if you read earlier in that chapter, who will lie to you? They will teach you wrong things. They will tell you lies that are relevant to the spiritual realm of heaven and hell and salvation.
And they will be lying to you. They will be false prophets, is the words that Jesus uses. What's the remedy for that kind of thing? As you look forward in your life, you need protection.
And in some translations you have word that is not Ramaha, the simple sort of a textual piece of word, it is logos. Here is a wonderful thing. Here is logos himself. Here is meaning himself telling you that the remedy to these false teachings is me.
It is my words. It is my principles. It is my teachings. That is the protection.
That is the remedy. These things to take them in, to absorb their meaning, and to do them. And if you do that, you'll be like a man who built his house, his future, upon a rock, instead of sand. Because when the water rises, it causes the effective stress equation to result in the non-application of the applied shear.
In order to put that in technical terms, it means your life turns into muck. That is what your life turns into when you build your life on sand. And the floods of life come against it. The protection against that is to absorb the meaning and the teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ.
That is your foundation for the future in your relationship to God. What about you and your neighbor? Hmm. You've heard it said, thou shalt love thy neighbor and hate thine enemy.
Well, Leviticus 19 does, indeed, talk about loving thy neighbor. And Deuteronomy, chapter 23, actually lists four specific people groups as to who is your enemy, and therefore not your neighbor, as far as the Jew was concerned. And two of them were the Edomites and the Egyptians. The Edomites go back to Abraham through Hagar.
And the Egyptians were where the Jews had resided. And so God's instruction in Deuteronomy 23 is you are not going to be harsh to the Edomite or the Egyptian. On the other hand, the Ammonite and the Moabite, who made it a point of intercepting you and making your lives miserable and doing everything to deter you, you shall never admit them into your Jewish congregation ever to the 10th generation. And so Jesus knew that they had taken this teaching from Deuteronomy 23.
And so well, you know, there's enemies. There's enemies. Well, I suppose there are. But I think that what the Pharisees are doing is to overextend something.
And we are fast forwarding roughly 1,800 years from Moses giving that until the coming of the Lord Jesus and the teaching that we should love our neighbor. And as we know from the very, very well-known parable of the prodigal son, and we know from the very well-known parable of the man who was beaten and left by the side of the road, the good Samaritan came, that was an answer to what? This was an answer to the question, who was my neighbor? And the Lord Jesus gave the parable of the good Samaritan.
Now do you know who your neighbor is? Somebody who has actually a competing religion that you're not supposed to talk to, that person was a neighbor to the man who was robbed. Does that help you with the definition of neighbor? It should.
It should. Matthew 22, we read in the multitude, heard this, they were astonished at his doctrine. You read exactly the same thing at the end of chapter seven. But when the Pharisees heard that they had put the Sadducees to silence, they were gathered together.
Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him a question tempting him and saying, Master, which is the great commandment in the law? Jesus said to him, they'll shout, love the Lord. Thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment to be in right relationship to God.
And the second is like unto it. They'll shout, love thy neighbor as thyself. So I would just say take that to heart, take Jesus instruction to heart. Move into the third and final aspect here.
As I have alluded, I think that the present day and age and world would actually be upside down, that they would say that this is actually number one. And the way in which we must allow ourselves to be governed is exactly as to how the government tells us to, with regard to ourselves and our relationship to society. And then case closed, end of discussion. And that is number one.
It is not number one. It is not number one. You need to first be in right relationship to God. You need second in your relationship to the people that God has brought into your life to allow God's definition of neighbor to rule your life and your interactions.
We come now to some verses that relate, I think, what we are within society. Now, I was cleaning up my garage and I learned something about myself, I learned a number of things about myself that I don't like. One of the things I learned by cleaning up my garage is that I have this like mania for buying flashlights. I don't know.
It seems like if there's a flashlight that runs out of batteries, I go and buy another flashlight for getting about how many I already own. That's pretty dumb. And I've got the, you know, actually the cost of the battery for the bigger ones is often more than the thing. You see, oh, it's on sale.
That's less than the battery, you know. So I find them in nooks and crannies and in funny places. I think if I put them all together, I could spot an airplane in the sky, you know. But the idea of light coming out from you, the light of God coming out from you, how far does it reach?
And what is the nature of it? The Christian writer Francis Schafer wrote a number of good books that I read in the late 70s and early 80s that influenced my heart and my mind is a Swiss theologian and writer. Francis Schafer, you don't hear much about him anymore. But he wrote many good books and good things.
And he wrote an entire book that's basically about the idea of Paulus. And the word that you would know in English would be Metropolis. And that means just basically a big busy city. But in the sense that this word a city, that is a palace, that is a culture.
And as Schafer points out in its exposes and brings out in exposits this meaning, you have within yourself a culture. Did you know that? You have within your household and in your family a culture. And it gives off a certain kind of light just as your heart gives off a certain kind of light.
And this congregation of believers gives off light, I hope, a certain kind of light, hopefully, the light of God. How far will it shine? How pure is it? Those are very good questions.
But one thing you don't do is put the light under a basket or a cardboard box or some such thing that means that it is irrelevant whether it is turned on or not. Because you have covered it up. Let us not cover it up. Let us do things in such a way that in purity, we seek to honor the Lord and let that light shine where it will as far as it can.
What is the culture of the believers in assembly, in a local group that worships the Lord on Sundays? What is that culture? What sort of a light does it give out? I hope that it is strong and pure and shines a good distance.
What about your house, your family? What about you, your own heart? Well, again, you need light in your own heart. In order to give off light, you need to be reflecting light.
You need to have light. You need to have received light. The Lord Jesus said, I am the light of the world. Do you have the Lord Jesus and his light in your life, in your heart, that you have the wherewithal to shine with a light to your wife, to your kids, to your coworkers, to the community, to the neighborhood?
That's a good challenge. Let us not be timid. Let us have that light and have no hesitation in opening it up and shining it and letting it shine. In terms of society, as I said earlier this morning, you're going to go with these principles.
You are going to go with the principles of God. Will your life get better? It may well get worse. And the Lord Jesus said, bless you, blessed are you.
That, you know, from an earthly point of view, it doesn't make sense. I don't like being persecuted. I don't like people giving me a hard time. I don't like it when people say bad things about me.
I assume that we have given people no reason to say anything bad. You can read 1 Peter 2. No reason, I hope not. But we should be prepared that when the light goes out, what tries to push it back is darkness.
But the Lord will strengthen us. And in being the light and enjoying the light, there is blessedness. There is blessedness. We need to be the salt of the earth.
It's a well-known Christian idiom. In fact, people will use that little phrase, you know, oh, he's the salt of the earth. They couldn't even tell you what book of the Bible that's from. They probably don't even know it's in the Bible.
But to have that value, that preservative, that antiseptic, that value, you know, if you take a sample of soil right out there by the side of the building, you will find some salt in it. Salt is everywhere. The Lord Jesus wants us to be the salt of the earth. We walk every day, you go out of this building and you go to your place of work tomorrow.
You know what, your feet. You're on the ground. And sometimes we get so connected that we lose all sight of what we are and what we are supposed to be. If we do, we will end up being the ones walked on.
We need to keep in mind that by the grace of God, we can be that value, that preservative, that antiseptic in the world, the world that gives this place, the kind of taste that God wants it to have in society. That's a very serious challenge. But I think that like the light, you are what you are. You try to be the Christian that you should be and you let the chips far away they may.
The light has to go out. I have to be the salt that I hopefully am. And that by the grace of God, these things will have their effect and we will be noticeably different than the rest of the dirt, the rest of the earth, the rest of this society. And so I have here, I'll close with this.
I have just a couple more slides, but I think we're good. That is a little image of a person thinking about thinking. Have you ever done some thinking about thinking? Thinking about what you've been thinking about?
Well, in this crazy life that we live, I would suggest to you that we do far too little of that than when God gives us principles and encouragement and we can find in here love, peace, joy, faith. We can find all of these things in communion with God and in his word. So that's where we need to be. That's where we need to find our strength.
We need time to reflect, time to commune with God, time to think about the things that we should be thinking about. May the grace of God enable us in the coming week to do exactly that, to honor the Lord, in all that we do and all that we say. We can ask him now for his grace in doing so. Let's pray.
Heavenly Father, we thank you for our Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ who taught us in so many ways who revealed our own hearts as to what they are, help us Lord to be pure, help us to be transparent toward you, to be in communion with you and thus to find a strength, to be light and to be salt in this world, in this society. We pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen.