Blessed are the pure in heart,
for they shall see God.

Matthew 5:8 ESV

Leviticus is a difficult book to both read and understand. In fact, we can rightly give it the title of “Bible Reading Plan Killer.” But the key to properly viewing Leviticus comes from seeing it as the centerpiece of the whole Pentateuch. You see, Exodus is all about God’s great work of redeeming Israel out of their slavery in Egypt so that they could be His people and He be their God. Although God speaks directly to them from Mount Sinai, they cannot remain in the desert and fulfill their calling as a kingdom of priests. So, the end of Exodus focuses on the building of the tabernacle or tent of meeting, which would be how God’s presence would constantly go with His people.

And in the final chapter, it really happened. God really had come down to dwell in their midst, just as He promised to do. But a problem also presented itself.  Even though God’s presence and glory were among them, they could not enter the tent of meeting. Even their mediator, Moses, was prevented from entering in a meeting with Yahweh. The LORD was closer than ever and yet still so separate from them.

Leviticus is the answer to this problem of separation. God is a pure God, so how can His people, who are impure in their sins, be in His presence? The answer is: blood, a lot of blood. As the author of Hebrews summarizes, “Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins” (9:22). This is because the wage of sin is death, and that cost must be paid for God to maintain His justice. Blood is the cost of purification. And only the pure and undefiled can be in the presence of the Holy One.

BLESSED ARE THE PURE IN HEART

Let us begin by reminding ourselves a few things. First, the Beatitudes are descriptions of the character those who are blessed or truly and eternally happy. Second, the Beatitudes are not virtues that we can develop through grit and determination nor are they gifts that only some Christians will express. Third, there is a general structure to the Beatitudes that the first four relate primarily to our inward relationship with God, while the final four deal more with our outward relationship toward others.

We began the first of the final four last week with “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.” As we said, mercy is showing by way of actions compassion and pity toward the miserable, particularly through giving, service, and forgiveness.

We now come to the Sixth Beatitude, which Lloyd-Jones’ rightly calls “one of the greatest utterances to be found anywhere in the whole realm of Holy Scripture”: Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

It seems fitting to study this particular Beatitude in the order it was written, so let us begin by asking what it means to be pure?

In Evangelical circles, it is probably most common to think of sexual purity. Indeed, many even now speak of Evangelical purity culture. And there is biblical warrant for such associations. In Galatians 5:19, when Paul begins listing the works of the flesh, he places impurity between sexual immorality and sensuality. Thus, Paul clearly had a mental category for specifically sexual purity/impurity. The problem with this understanding, however, is that it is too narrow. Although there are times where it is used particularly in that sense, the concept of purity goes far beyond sexuality alone.

Others may also think of purity as being entirely sinless, but that is not the case. As this Beatitude indicates, it is possible to be pure in heart; however, while we ought to pursue righteous perfection, we will not attain that goal within this life.

What then is purity? Throughout Scripture, the word καθαρος is used in two ways. First, it can refer to, as Lloyd-Jones says, singleness, that is, of being unadulterated, unmixed, and unmingled. In this sense, pure is often used as an adjective for describing gold or silver. Pure gold, then, has been purged as thoroughly as possible of other materials that are mixed within it. Yahweh’s instructed the elements of the tabernacle to be made with pure gold.

Second, purity is also used to speak of cleanliness. This is one of the dominant themes of Leviticus, and the Septuagint uses the same word. Indeed, recall the account of the leper in Mark 1:40-45. When the leper knelt down, he said, “If you will, you can make me clean.” Christ then responded, “I will; be clean.” Both the leper and Jesus used the verbal form of καθαρος.

When we put these notions together, we easily see why impurity is often used as a term for our sinfulness, for sin corrupts and defiles us. Our sin makes us unclean before God. Sin is lawlessness, a rebellion against God’s commandments, and it makes us unclean in God’s sight. In contrast, moral purity means doing what God commands and being clean in His eyes.

Because of this, it would be fitting if Jesus had referred to being pure in eyes, pure in ears, pure of hands, pure of speech, etc. That is very well what we might have expected that He would say. And it certainly is true that we should be careful what we see, what hear, what we do, and what we say. Yet Jesus goes to the heart of the matter by speaking of being pure in… heart. But what is the heart?

Blanchard gives a great answer:

It is that which radically governs not only our emotions but our thoughts, desires, motives, ambitions, affections, will, words and actions. The heart stands for the entire personality, the whole man. It is that which makes a person what he is. (191)

Thus, biblically, the heart refers to far more than the primary muscle of our circulatory system. Instead, the heart is the very core of one’s identity. Who you are in your heart is who you really are. It represents the most fundamental sense of you being you. As Proverbs 27:19 says, “As in water face reflects face, so the heart of man reflects man.” In other words, knowing a person’s heart means knowing them wholly and completely.

This is why Proverbs 4:23 tells us to “keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life.” Everything we do springs from our heart because our heart is who we are. It makes sense, then, that Jesus would take purity past the hands, past the eyes, past the ears, and past the tongue into the heart, for that is the defining characteristic of Jesus’ ministry as well as all of Scripture. Other religions are concerned chiefly with matters such as behavior, fulfillment, peace, happiness, etc. But, as Lloyd-Jones writes:

The gospel of Jesus Christ is concerned about the heart: all its emphasis is upon the heart. Read the accounts which we have in the Gospels of the teaching of our blessed Lord, and you will find that all along He is talking about the heart. (108)

Of course, in doing so, Jesus was not deviating from the Old Testament, for God has always demanded worship from the heart. The Shema in Deuteronomy 6:5, for instance, tells us to love God with all our heart. Or we can look at the Tenth Commandment against coveting, which is entirely a sin of the heart. Or consider Psalm 24:3-5:

            Who shall ascend the hill of the LORD?
                        And who shall stand in his holy place?
            He who has clean hands and a pure heart,
                        who does not lift up his soul to what is false
                        and does not swear deceitfully.
            He will receive blessing from the LORD
                        and righteousness from the God of his salvation.

Indeed, notice that there is a connection between a pure heart and clean hands. It is a connection that comes in Proverbs 4:23-27 as well. After commanding us to vigilantly guard the heart, notice how we are commanded to do so:

Keep your heart with all vigilance,
for from it flow the springs of life.
Put away from you crooked speech,
and put devious talk far from you.
Let your eyes look directly forward,
and your gaze be straight before you.
Ponder the path of your feet;
then all your ways will be sure.
Do not swerve to the right or to the left;
turn your foot away from evil.

While it is the heart that must ultimately be pure for the blessed, purity of heart is still bound to purity of hands, feet, eyes, ears, tongue, etc. What we do has an actual impact on our hearts. Therefore, no one can say happily sin, while remaining pure in heart. Ian Hamilton makes this great point:

Sanctification is radically physical. The devotion that God seeks from his children is not theoretical; it is psychosomatic. Our devotion to God is to be expressed in and through what we do with our bodies. It matters what we look at with our eyes, what we do with our hands, where we go with our feet, what we think with our minds. Sanctification is not a theory; it is a lifestyle of concrete, embodied, loving obedience to God.  

To be truly pure in heart, our outward actions must match our inward desires. Thus, I think Kent Hughes is right to conclude:

Here in the sixth Beatitude it means a heart that does not bring mixed motives or divided loyalties to its relationship with God. It is a heart of singleness in devotion to God—pure, unmixed devotion. James refers to this idea when he says, “Purify your hearts, you double-minded” (James 4:8). That is, “Get rid of your mixed motives, your duplicity, your double-mindedness; be simple and pure in your devotion.” (57)

This is why purity of heart is often associated with sincerity. Indeed, we might say that David’s sincerity is what made him such a great man of God. His sins were certainly great, and he was just as capable as any of us of attempting to cover up his sins. Yet when he was convicted of his sin, David prayed prayers like Psalm 51. By the way, in the Septuagint that Psalm uses a form of καθαρος three times: v. 2 – “Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin!” v. 7- “Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.” v. 10 – “Create in me a clean heart [or a pure heart], O God, and renew a right spirit within me.” Therefore, David was able to rightly say in Psalm 32:5:

            I acknowledged my sin to you,
                        and I did not cover my iniquity;
            I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the LORD,”
                        and you forgave the iniquity of my sin. Selah

So, even though David was sinful, he was not hypocritical or duplicitous. Indeed, the hypocrite and double-minded cannot be pure in heart because their motives are mixed. It is impossible for such a person to truly repent, for they never fully acknowledge their sins, and as 1 John 1:8 says, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” By the way, that verse is exactly why Christians do not need to worry about going on hypocrite witch-hunts: hypocrites deceive themselves first and foremost. This is why Lloyd-Jones was right to note that “you can start trying to clean your heart, but at the end of your long life it will be as black as it was at the beginning, perhaps blacker” (115). Thankfully, hypocrisy can be repented of alongside any other sin.

FOR THEY SHALL SEE GOD

Now we come to the second half of the verse, which is the great promise to the pure in heart: for they shall see God. Seeing God is normally described by theologians with three terms: the beatific vision (visio beatifica), the visio Dei, and the summum bonum. The vision of God is the blessed sight and the highest good for mankind. Beeke and Smalley write:

This is the “one thing” that the godly desire above all else: “to behold the beauty of the LORD” (Ps. 27:4). Augustine said, “To behold God is the end and purpose of all our loving activity.” When God grants a new heart that loves him, he also ensures that this person will enjoy whom he loves: “Delight thyself also in the LORD; and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart” (37:4). What the godly have enjoyed in communion with God is only foretaste of that Christ promises. Christ’s “blessed” (beati in the Latin Vulgate) will ultimately issue in the beatific vision of God’s glory—their “blessed hope” (Titus 2:13). (RST Vol. 3, 828-829)

This is why affirm in the Westminster Shorter Catechism that the chief end of man is “to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” Each week I have been asking my Classical Conversations class the first three questions of the Catechism for Boys and Girls. The third question rightly asks: “Why did God create you and all things?” The answer: “For His own glory!” I have then been following up with asking what does “for His own glory” mean. It means that God created us and all things to display how great and good He is. Or we could say, we created us to know Him, to discover who He is.

But this is not narcissism in God, it is love.  In John 17:3, Jesus said that knowing God is eternal life. We also read that God is the Author of life, that in Him we live and move and have our being, that all things were made through, for, and by Christ, and that Christ upholds all things by the word of His power. If all of that is true, to be disconnected from God is to be disconnected from Him who gives life. So, to ask why God can’t just let us be happy apart from Him is like asking why we can’t live with oxygen. If God is all He says He is, there is no joy and happiness outside of Him. Thus, the chief end of man truly is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever. As we enjoy God by knowing Him more and more, we also glorify Him more and more by exalting Him as the supreme Treasure and the greatest and highest Good. Indeed, if men delight at beholding the Grand Canyon, Mount Everest, the Great Barrier Reef, or any other natural wonder, how much more will we delight in beholding the Creator Himself!

Of course, many do not desire that vision (in fact, none of us naturally do). Only the pure in heart shall see God, and only the pure in heart want to see God. As with each of the Beatitudes, while the promises have their ultimate fulfillment at the return of Christ, they have a partial fulfillment even now in this life. Thus, the pure in heart see God even in this world. But where can the invisible God be seen, you ask.

The pure in heart see Him in creation. David, of course, wonderfully testifies to this, saying: “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork” (Psalm 19:1). As does Paul in Romans 1:20, “For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.”

We can also point to the three spiritual disciplines that we mentioned in the Fourth Beatitude: Scripture, prayer, and the Church. Of seeing God in the church, Spurgeon writes:

The impure in heart cannot him there at all. To them, the Church of God is nothing but a conglomeration of divided sects; and looking upon these sects, they can see nothing but faults, and failures, and imperfections. It should always be remembered that every man sees that which is according to his own nature. When the vulture soars in the sky, he sees the carrion wherever it may be; and when the dove on silver wings mounts up to the azure, she sees the clean winnowed corn wherever it may be. The lion sees his prey in the forest, and the lamb sees its food in the grassy meadow. Unclean hearts see little or nothing good among God’s people, but the pure in heart see God in his Church, and rejoice to meet him there.

We also see God through His providential hand in our lives, particularly in the midst of trials and suffering. Affliction hardens the heart of the impure, making them angry against God. The pure, however, trust the good purposes of God and are able to say with the psalmist: “It is good for me that I was afflicted, that I might learn your statutes” (Psalm 119:71). Even though they may not understand the purpose of their suffering in this life, they know that the sight Christ’s face will make wipe away every tear and pain.

The reality is that the pure and impure can look at the same sunset, read the same verse, go to the same church, pray the same prayer, and go through the same affliction, but only the pure will have a spiritual sight of God that is the foretaste of the blessed vision that is to come. David expresses this reality in 2 Samuel 22:26-27, when he prays:

            With the merciful you show yourself merciful;
                        with the blameless man you show yourself blameless;
            with the purified you deal purely,
                        and with the crooked you make yourself seem tortuous.

HOW TO HAVE A PURE HEART

How then can we have a pure heart? We begin with the realization that none of us naturally possess one. After being asked by some Pharisees why one of His disciples ate without washing his hands, in Mark 7:20-23, Jesus tells us this:

And he said, “What comes out of a person is what defiles him. For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”

This is a terrifying reality. Corruption is easier to manage if it plays by the rules of the scribes and Pharisees. Sure, it might be a pain to observe each letter of tradition without fail, but they presumed the basic premise that corruption is an external element, that we are essentially good as long as we avoid corrupting behaviors. Jesus, however, shoots down that notion, tracing the source of corruption down to each and every person’s heart. Sin and defilement come from within. Evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness are all products of the heart.

We like to assume that we are good people who occasionally do bad things, and even then, we convince ourselves that our intensions are generally pure. Sin, therefore, is simply a problem of behavior. Indeed, the world around us is not far removed from the scribes and Pharisees, for they too believe in defilement by outward actions. But Jesus shatters this thought by stating that we do bad things because we have bad hearts, and if our heart is bad, we are bad. Sin is not a behavioral issue; it is a being issue. We are not righteous people who occasionally sin. We sin because we are sinners. Our heart is corrupt, and since the heart is the core of our being, there is no aspect of ourselves that escapes corruption, behavior included. This problem of defilement, therefore, requires a solution far greater than behavior modification.

That is bad news indeed. Thankfully, through the prophet Ezekiel, God promised to do exactly what David prayed for: to create a pure heart within His people.

Therefore say to the house of Israel, Thus says the Lord GOD: It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations to which you came. And I will vindicate the holiness of my great name, which has been profaned among the nations, and which you have profaned among them. And the nations will know that I am the LORD, declares the Lord GOD, when through you I vindicate my holiness before their eyes. I will take you from the nations and gather you from all the countries and bring you into your land. I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. You shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers, and you shall be my people, and I will be your God. And I will deliver you from all your uncleannesses. (Ezekiel 36:22-29a)

The word uncleannesses could also be translated as impurities. God alone is the one who can deliver us from our impurities and from our impure hearts, for we can read verse 25 as saying: I will sprinkle pure water on you, and you shall be pure from all your impurities, and from all your idols I will purify you. And He does so by giving us a new heart.

This is nothing less than a spiritual heart transplant. Or, to use equally radical language, Jesus told us that it is a new birth. We cannot properly obey God because the very core of our being corrupted, so God will give us a new core and cause us to walk in His statutes and to carefully obey His rules. But how did God accomplish this work?

Under the Old Testament, God graciously let His people offer Him animals instead of their own blood. Each animal that an Israelite took from their field to slice its throat open before the bronze altar, screamed that “in the day you eat, you shall surely die.” And as they placed their hand upon the animal’s head, they were to reflect that something innocent was taking their place. Because animals are not created in the image of God, they are not morally unclean as we are. Indeed, because humans alone were made in God’s likeness, Yahweh gave mankind dominion over all the animals of the earth. Thus, every sacrifice was the slaughter of what we were supposed to rule over in our own place.

Unfortunately, the continual need for animal sacrifice also proclaimed to God’s people that “it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins” (Hebrews 10:4). Christ alone could accomplish that work. Being the eternal Word, He is infinitely greater than us. Yet in taking on flesh, He is also one of us. And by living a life of perfect obedience to the Father, His death was as undeserved as the animals that the Israelites sacrificed, and even more so since He is the Maker of all things. Even so, upon the cross, our sin was laid upon Christ. All of our sin and impurities were laid upon Him. And with His death, He made the once for all purification for our sins, washing us clean through His own precious blood.

Thus, as we come to our King’s Table, let us follow the pattern of David, acknowledging our sin and refusing to cover up our iniquity. According to our own merit, none of us deserve to be called pure in heart, and none of us deserve to see God. Yet this bread and cup are perpetual testimonies to the sacrifice of our Lord, who gave Himself to cleanse us from our sins. Not through the cleanness of our own hands or the purity of our own heart do we draw near to God, but through the cleansing work of Christ for us. Therefore, as we come to the Table to behold our Lord by faith through the bread and cup which are signs of His body and blood, we set our eyes also upon the great and glorious day when our faith shall be made sight, when we shall see Him face to face. On that day, our confidence will be the same as it is today: “What can wash away my sins? Nothing but the blood the Jesus.”

Further Resources

The Beatitudes // Charles Spurgeon

The Beatitudes // Thomas Watson

The Beatitudes // A. W. Pink

Sermons on the Beatitudes // John Calvin

Hero of Heroes: Seeing Christ in the Beatitudes // Iain Duguid

Studies in the Sermon on the Mount // Martin Lloyd-Jones

Sermon on the Mount // R. Kent Hughes