Blessed are the poor in spirit
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Matthew 5:3 ESV

Paradoxically, King David’s most notorious sins give us a glimpse at just what makes him a great man of God. You probably know the story. After years on the run from Saul, David’s kingdom is finally established. But in his security, he began to make moral compromises. He already ignored God’s explicit command in Deuteronomy 17:17 that Israel’s king “shall not acquire many wives for himself,” which is subtly told to us in 2 Samuel 5:13: “And David took more concubines and wives from Jerusalem…”

But then we come to 2 Samuel 11. It begins with David remaining safely in Jerusalem rather than going out to war with his armies. Then it sees the king lusting over the wife of one of his soldiers, impregnating her, and having her husband killed in battle. Thus, in one chapter, the man after God’s own heart explicitly broke Commandments 6-10 and implicitly broke Commandments 1-5. How can we honestly number such a man among the people of God?

In response to David being rebuked by the prophet Nathan, David composed Psalm 51, which includes these great prayers:

Have mercy on me, O God,
according to your steadfast love;
according to your abundant mercy
blot out my transgressions.
Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,
and cleanse me from my sin!
For I know my transgressions,
and my sin is ever before me.
Against you, you only, have I sinned
and done what is evil in your sight,
so that you may be justified in your words
nd blameless in your judgment…
Create in me a clean heart, O God,
and renew a right spirit within me…
For you will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it;
you will not be pleased with a burnt offering.
The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit;
a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise. (vv. 1-4, 11, 16-17)

Here we see the great truth of salvation. God’s people are not the perfectly righteous, for no one is. Those whom God favors acknowledge their sins and trust Him alone for salvation. As Yahweh said in Isaiah 66:2:

But this is the one to whom I will look:
he who is humble and contrite in spirit
and trembles at my word.

The blessed are like David. They confess their spiritual poverty and put their faith in the Lord alone to save them.

POOR IN SPIRIT

Last week, we began our study of the Beatitudes by briefly considering their context within the Sermon on the Mount and then focusing upon the word that begins each: blessed. From that study, we concluded that being blessed meant being supremely and lasting happy because we have found favor with God Himself. Indeed, we emphasized that this blessedness or happiness is not a momentary grace; rather, it is a state of being. Thus, the Beatitudes are not a list of virtues to cultivate, which would mean we must be poor in spirit, mournful, etc. in order to be blessed. No, the Beatitudes are characteristics that the blessed are known by, to some degree at least.

Keeping that in mind, we now come to the first Beatitude: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

What does it mean to be poor in spirit? We can answer that question negatively and positively.

Negatively, being poor in spirit is not the same as simply being financially poor. It is somewhat popular today, as it has occasionally been in history, to think of the poor as being inherently more righteous than the wealthy. However, William Tyndale is correct that:

Riches is the gift of God, given man to maintain the degrees of this world, and therefore not evil; yea, and some must be poor and some rich, if we shall have an order in this world. And God, our Father, divideth riches and poverty among his children, according to his godly pleasure and wisdom, so doth not poverty certify thee; but to put thy trust in the living God maketh thee heir thereof.

Indeed, while Jesus warned against the dangers of riches, there is no virtue in poverty. Remember that in Exodus 23:3 God forbid the Israelites from being “partial to a poor man in his lawsuit,” which was obviously a tendency even among the ancients. Of course, Proverbs gives us the most balanced understanding, saying:

Remove far from me falsehood and lying;
give me neither poverty nor riches;
feed me with the food that is needful for me,
lest I be full and deny you
and say, “Who is the LORD?”
or lest I be poor and steal
and profane the name of my God. (30:8-9)

As we noted last week, although the majority of people are born into physical poverty, no one is born into spiritual poverty. It is an internal work of the Holy Spirit.

Neither is spiritual poverty what Kent Hughes calls showy humility. Martin Lloyd-Jones talks about encountering such a man, who said, “You know, I am a mere nobody, a very unimportant man, really. I do not count; I am not a great man in the Church; I am just one of those men who carry the bag for the minister.” The doctor noted:

He was anxious that I should know what a humble man he was, how ‘poor in spirit’. Yet by his anxiety to make it known he was carrying the very thing he was trying to establish… the man who thus, at it were, glories in his poverty of spirit and thereby proves he is not humble. (47)

We are each made in God’s image and, in this life, even the wicked still have God’s common grace upon them. Thus, it is not beneficial to act as though we have no positive qualities or worth. For instance, an Olympic athlete who denies his own excellence exhibits false humility. True humility, however, is acknowledging that all of his greatest efforts contribute nothing to his worth before God and that God is the supplier of that very excellence. Indeed, Bach was known to begin his compositions with a prayer for help and concluded with writing SDG (soli Deo gloria). He glorified God through acknowledging his dependency upon Him, and it would have only been a false humility for him to insist that his music was bad.

Thomas Watson makes the distinction between being spiritually poor and being poor in spirit. The Laodiceans were spiritually poor, as Revelation 3:17 says of them, “For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.” Their dependency upon material wealth was impoverishing them spiritually. Of course, unbelievers are also spiritually poor. Yet, like the Laodiceans, most cannot see their true poverty, and Watson is right to note that “he is in the worst sense poor who has no sense of his poverty” (33).

Positively, being poor in spirit means acknowledging our wholesale spiritual poverty. The Greek word for poor is πτωχος, which as Kent Hughes notes:

It comes from a verbal root that denotes “to cower and cringe like a beggar.” In classical Greek ptochos came to mean “someone who crouches about, wretchedly begging.” In the New Testament it bears something of this idea because it denotes poverty so deep that the person must obtain his living by begging. He is fully dependent on the giving of others. He cannot survive without help from the outside. Thus an excellent translation is “beggarly poor.” (17)

Indeed, if we are not careful to note that a beggarly poverty is meant, we may easily and subconsciously think of American poverty. Only homelessness really comes close to resembling the beggarly poverty of the ancient world, and even then, we still have homeless shelters, soup kitchens, and other such programs to give aid. But still, it reflects the original idea of complete and utter dependence upon others. That is the kind of poverty that Jesus speaks of.

But it is not material poverty but poverty of spirit. The Greek word πνευμα, like the Hebrew ruach, can mean spirit, wind, or breath. Here, as is frequently the case, it refers “to the inner person, with his feelings or inner strength” (Beeke and Smalley, RST Vol 2, 231). Thus, by saying poverty of the spirit, Jesus is moving past all external factors and going to the root of who we are. And crucially, all of humanity is poor spiritually. Although God created us with the immeasurable wealth of dwelling forever with Him, we renounced those riches through our sin. All sin is a rejection of God’s goodness and a declaration of our own supposed divinity. Yet that rebellion leaves us destitute. Try as we may, we have nothing apart from God. He is the almighty Creator, who has created all things, and He is the Giver of the spirit of life within each of us. And in our arrogance, we commit treason against Him. In His presence, we are entirely destitute. Indeed, even if we, like the good angels, had never sinned, we would still have no reason for pride or boasting, for we would merely have done our rightful duty.

But while all people are spiritually poor, only the poor in spirit acknowledge their spiritual destitution and beg God for mercy. Indeed, I agree with Blanchard that John Brown may have written one of the best descriptions of the person who is poor in spirit:

He knows himself to be an entirely dependent being; he knows himself to be an inexcusable sinner; he knows himself to be a righteously condemned criminal; he knows that “in him, that is, in his flesh, dwells no good thing”; he knows that he has, that he can have, no hope, but in the sovereign mercy of God; that he has no righteousness to glory in, but the obedience unto death of the Son of God; and that whatever is right and holy in his sentiments and character is owing entirely to the influence of the Spirit of God; and the knowledge and faith of all this naturally produces deep, habitual abasement of spirit. He feels himself “dust and ashes”, guilty dust and ashes.

“This poverty,” writes Beeke and Smalley, “consists of humility before the Holy One, contrition over sin, and trembling at his word” (RST Vol 3, 816), which is precisely what David displayed after his great sin against Bathsheba and her husband. Although the king sinned in pride, he beheld and confessed his spiritual poverty afterward. He acknowledged his sin and could only appeal to God’s steadfast love and mercy. He saw how totally corrupt his heart was, so that his only hope of salvation lay in God Himself creating a clean heart within him.

Of course, the wonder of the gospel is that that is exactly what God does for us through Christ. He does give us new hearts. Indeed, He places His own Spirit within us to supply us with the strength to obey His commands and kill our sinful desires. Yet He does so only for those who confess their spiritual poverty and beg for mercy as David did.

Can you see why this is necessarily the first Beatitude? The first grace that God gives us is to show us our need of His grace. Indeed, this is what makes the gospel so difficult to receive. Although it is free and requires no effort on our part to be saved, in order to receive the gift of grace we must first recognize our need of it. Thus, Watson is correct in saying:

Till we are poor in spirit we are not capable of receiving grace. He who is swollen with an opinion of self-excellency and self-sufficiency, is not fit for Christ. He is full already. If the hand be full of pebbles, it cannot receive gold. The glass is first emptied before you pour in wine. God first empties a man of himself, before he pours in the precious wine of his grace. (36)

As nearly every commentator points out, Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector is a perfect picture of this Beatitude:

He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt: “Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted. (Luke 18:9-14)

Of this parable, Spurgeon comments:

Poverty of spirit in the publican was better than the fullness of external excellence in the Pharisee. As the weakest and poorest man is nobler than the strongest of all the beasts of the field, so is the meanest spiritual man more precious in the sight of the Lord than the most eminent of the self-sufficient children of men. The smallest diamond is worth more than the largest pebble, the lowest degree of grace excels the loftiest attainment of nature.

We should also note that while we can only receive salvation through being poor in spirit; the Christian life ought to be continually marked by such poverty of spirit. Unfortunately, many think of salvation as simply being a reset on our sin counter. Jesus clears our sin record, and we are able to take things from there. Here, however, is what Jesus said:

I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. If anyone does not abide in me he is thrown away like a branch and withers; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned. If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples. As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my father’s commandments and abide in his love. (John 15:5-10)

Indeed, Jesus modeled being poor in spirit for throughout His earthly life. We see this in how Jesus leaned upon the Scriptures while being tempted by Satan, and we see it in how Jesus saturated His life and ministry with prayer. When acting in pride and self-reliance, aren’t time in the Scriptures and prayer the first things we set aside? After all, what habits better display being poor in spirit? A person who is not poor in spirit may study the Scriptures with a degree of fascination, but God’s people open the Bible saying with Peter, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68). Likewise, a person who is not poor in spirit may pray in a similar fashion to the Pharisee in the parable, but the poor in spirit will pray out of their desperate need for God. In fact, prayer and Scripture-intake are so important because they fix our attention upon Christ and our need of Him, and that is the great secret to being poor of spirit: stop looking at yourself and look to Jesus. Lloyd-Jones makes just this point:

How does one therefore become ‘poor in spirit’? The answer is that you do not look at yourself or begin by trying to do things to yourself. That was the whole error of monasticism. Those poor men in their desire to do this said, ‘I must go out of society, I must sacrifice my flesh and suffer hardship, I must mutilate my body.’ No, no, the more you do that the more conscious will you be of yourself, and the less ‘poor in spirit’. The way to become poor in spirit is to look at God. Read this Book about Him, read His law, look at what He expects from us, contemplate standing before Him… Look at Him; and the more we look at Him, the more hopeless shall we feel by ourselves, and in and of ourselves, and the more shall we become ‘poor in spirit’. Look at Him, and keep looking at Him… You cannot truly look at Him without feeling your absolute poverty, and emptiness. (52)

FOR THEIRS IS THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN

We should notice that every Beatitude contains two parts. First, we have the characteristics of the blessed. Second, we have the reason for why they are blessed. So far, we have observed the first quality of the blessed: they are poor in spirit. Let us, therefore, conclude with why the poor in spirit are blessed or happy: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

How paradoxical is this? The poor in spirit are blessed because the kingdom of heaven belongs to them. Who can own a kingdom and be properly called poor? But is that not the point? The kingdom of God works contrary to how we typically think. Blanchard points out that:

Our English translations of Matthew’s phrase hides an interesting point of emphasis, which is that whenever he used the word rendered ‘heaven’ it is always plural: he writes of ‘the kingdom of the heavens’. The Bible uses the word ‘heavens’ in three major senses: the envelope of air surrounding the earth, what we now think of as ‘outer space’ and the immediate dwelling place of God… The relevant point about all these is that all three are extra-terrestrial. They extend far beyond the earth, literally and metaphorically, and ‘the kingdom of the heavens’ is one which does not originate on earth, is not earthly in character, does not employ earthly means and has no earthly limitations. (69)

In this kingdom, the last are the first and the first last. The great ones are lowly, and the slaves are great. The proud are humbled, and the humble are exalted. So, it is here. If you would be truly and eternally rich, you must first understand your poverty.

Indeed, while we still pray for the kingdom of heaven to come in its finality with the return of Christ, because it is a spiritual kingdom, it is a present reality for all who are in Christ. The poor in spirit submit to the kingship of Jesus and already belong to His kingdom.

This is a great cause for happiness. In the time of the New Testament, Roman citizenship was immensely valuable. Rome controlled the world, and its citizens had rights that non-citizens could not expect. For example, a Roman citizen had a right to a trial before being condemned, which Paul made use of after already being beaten and imprisoned in Philippi (see Acts 16). Indeed, Paul even exercised his right to make an appeal to Caesar for taking the gospel to Rome.

How much more valuable is citizenship in the kingdom of God! We are able to make our appeals not to an earthly king but to the King of kings, the Sovereign One, who is in control of all things. And He is not a miser with His presence. No, He tells us to petition Him without ceasing, to give Him no rest until He answers our prayers. And He Himself speaks to us through His Word, which He enables us to understand and to obey by sending His very own Spirit to dwell with us.

Furthermore, our citizenship in the kingdom is the greatest of all securities. The twelfth chapter of Hebrews concludes with the reminder that God will one day shake away the current created order. The heavens and the earth, the visible and the invisible, will be wiped away and made new. In verse 28, the author then says, “Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken.” In the same way that God provided the ark for Noah, He has also provided a way for His people to endure the day of His wrath and be brought safely to the new cosmos that He will establish. This new and better ‘ark’ is the Son of God Himself. It is belonging to the kingdom that He has established in Himself.

Whatever our present circumstances might be, how can this not produce a deep well of happiness within a person! Who, after all, among the pre-flood world was more blessed than Noah and his family? This is the root and seed of true happiness, and we would do well to consider the following words from Morgan:

The happiness of the Kingdom is a natural sequence, not an arbitrary reward. The King does not bestow gifts to make men happy. He creates a condition withing the men, which enables him to find happiness everywhere. He does not create happiness by new surroundings. He creates new surroundings by happiness. He takes a man and makes him happy by reason of his character, and then immediately this man puts his hand on everything than lies about him, changing his environment by himself being changed. Happiness begins within the man, never without… Happiness has its root not in outward circumstances, but in inward condition of character. (43)

Or, as John Trapp rightly put, “He that rides to be crowned will not think much of a rainy day.” And the Table before us is a reminder of that crowning. This bread and cup are tangible pictures of our inclusion within the kingdom of heaven. Through the sacrificial death of our Lord to cleanse us of our sins, we have been summoned to share this fellowship meal around His Table. And through this eating and drinking, we set our eyes upon the blessed hope of His return to bring the fullness of His kingdom to earth. Indeed, let our receiving of these elements remind us that it is the “Father’s good pleasure to give” us the kingdom, and let us, as spiritual beggars, receive it with humility and thanks unceasing.