Matthew 5:10-12
For today, we are finishing up a series on the Beatitudes out of Matthew chapter 5. If you want to turn in your Bibles there, you can do that now. But it’s really been a joy for me to have this opportunity to preach and teach through the Beatitudes. It’s been convicting, but also encouraging to my own soul. And I just find our Lord’s teaching to be absolutely fascinating, brilliant. The depths of which we cannot plumb, we’ll spend eternity just thinking about these things more deeply.
But today we are going to be finishing this series on the Beatitudes and Jesus, this is really the Beatitudes are out of his larger, Sermon on the Mount, and he begins this Sermon on the Mount with these Beatitudes. And in these Beatitudes, Jesus is really painting a portrait of what a true kingdom citizen looks like and we get into today the final Beatitude. And this final Beatitude really is the brilliant final brush stroke on this painting of a kingdom citizen. It brings everything together perfectly. The citizen of heaven and today how the world responds to this kind of citizen. But let’s begin by reading the text.
We’re going to read Matthew 5 verses 1 through 12. Matthew writes, “Now when Jesus saw the crowds, He went up on the mountain; and after he sat down, His disciples came to Him. And he opened His mouth and began to teach them, saying, ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the lowly, for they shall inherit the earth. And blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.’ And ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.’ And ‘Blessed are those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when people insult you and persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of Me. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward in heaven is great; for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.’”
I started this series; actually, I was kind of shocked to look back, but I started this back in April of last year and then took a break and preached a couple more out of the Beatitudes in August, and then we’re just now getting to wrap up this series. But back in April and back in August, I mentioned in a couple of those sermons how these Beatitudes are really linked together. It’s not in isolation.
It’s a portrait Jesus painting of the citizen, and all the parts have to fit together. They’re interconnected. They even build on one another. That is to say, it is the one who is poor in spirit, the one who recognizes his spiritual poverty before God, that it is this one that really recognizes he has nothing to offer God except his life of sin, his poverty; it is this one who then goes on to mourn his sin. Understanding his spiritual poverty, he mourns his sin, the one who sees himself accurately, his spiritual condition accurately.
He mourns his sinful condition. This one who mourns his sinful condition is the one who is lowly and meek. For any insult that someone might bring against us, if we really understand our sinful condition, we know that whatever people bring against us, there’s nothing compared to what we deserve for our sin. We can then act in kindness, restraint, calmness in the face of conflict. Such a lowly and meek person knows that there’s really nothing in this world worth living for or fighting for. Instead, he seeks after and hungers and thirsts after righteousness.
It’s the one who hungers and thirsts for righteousness, who seeks to be merciful and relieve the suffering of other sinners around him, other brothers and sisters caught in sin. Such a one acts for the good of others to relieve their suffering, but he does this not out of a desire to look good. It’s from a pure heart, a rightly ordered heart that thinks God’s thoughts after him, walks in all of his ways. His emotions walk, or they follow in alignment with the truth. This one doesn’t lead with emotions. He seeks to bring true peace to those around him. He speaks the truth. He judges rightly. He wages war against the kingdom of darkness, makes peace between men and God and men and other men with the gospel of peace.
This is the portrait that Jesus paints of the true citizen of heaven. It’s holistic. It’s comprehensive from the heart, out to the actions. And what we find in the text that we’re going to be covering today is how the world responds to that kind of person. It could be easy to look at the Beatitudes and think, yeah, that’s me. But this last Beatitude, the, the final brush strokes on this portrait that Jesus paints, it really puts our confession to the test. And I’ll return to this point in the conclusion to think about it more. But in order to give this the proper weight, we have to exegete the passage and then we’ll return to that.
But in our passage today, Jesus encourages us with three truths regarding persecution, that we might have an accurate view of ourselves in the world, that we might think rightly about persecution and even rejoice in it. So three points for the outline this morning, if you want to jot these down in your notes. Persecution indicates kingdom citizenship is point number one: Persecution indicates kingdom citizenship. Point number two: Persecution shows personal identification, and then point number three: Persecution provokes eternal joy.
Persecution indicates kingdom citizenship, persecution shows personal identification, and persecution provokes eternal joy. Let’s start with that first one in verse 10. Persecution indicates kingdom citizenship. Look at verse 10 with me again. “Blessed are those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. We’ll start with this little word here, persecuted. It’s a word that has a broad range of meaning. First, it can refer to one who moves rapidly and decisively toward an object to hasten, to run after, to press on after something, like if you’re playing a sport, there’s a ball, you’re seeking to go get the ball and then to take it and score. That’s one way it can be used.
A second way it can be used. It can be used to refer, to cause to run or set something in motion, to drive away, to drive something out. So when you’re upset and you hastily and with hostility ’cause someone else to, to flee could be used for that. It’s also used of the wind to just drive a ship along and drive it away. Third, it can be used to refer to following in haste in order to seek after something, run after something, pursue something. This was a term naturally used in the context of war, referring to pursuing after a fleeing enemy. It was a pursuit to find and overtake someone in battle. Not typically used to indicate you’re pursuing them for a friendly visit. This is typically a, a hostile pursuit. It can be used in a positive sense, and it is quite often in Scripture actually.
In a figurative sense, the word can be used to encourage us to intensely pursue things like hospitality, Romans 12:13, or to intensely pursue mutual peace 1 Peter 3:11, or to pursue holiness and love, 1 Corinthians 4:11; pursue doing good, 1 Thessalonians 5:15, in pursuing righteousness in 1 Timothy 6:11, and, and other passages. So it can be used in a positive sense, but it is more often used in a sense of a hostile pursuit and this intense hostile pursuit, pressing and pressing, driving away until the object that is disdained is gone, like a ship blown far away.
This is the idea that Jesus takes to describe persecution, which is the fourth range of meaning. The word can refer to harassing someone, especially because of beliefs, but this last sense of the word is unique, and it’s distinctive in the New Testament, that is to say, before Jesus used this word in his teaching, it was never referred to pursuing and chasing and driving someone away, because of religious reasons.
Jesus took this idea and uses it for that to mean just that; they’re being hounded, chased and pressed and driven away because of their beliefs. It is the Beatitude kind of person, the person that Jesus portrays in the Beatitude that the world will, with great hostility and intensity pursue and drive away. In the next verse, Jesus elaborates a little bit on what this looks like. He says people will insult; they’ll try to drive you away with insults. They will try to drive the people who’ve got away with insults.
They might pursue you even if you try to walk away; pursue you, continue to insult you, follow after you until you’re far enough away that they their anger subsides. They feel comfortable with how far they’ve driven you. But if insults don’t drive you away, Jesus says, they will say all kinds of false and evil things about you. If their insults don’t drive you away, they’ll make false accusations, even try to get you locked up to keep you away from them.
And then they might even hound you further and demand that the authorities condone putting you to death, as many as was the case in the New Testament, and if that doesn’t happen and they can’t get the authorities to lock you up or sign off on your execution, they might just take care of that themselves. We saw that in in Acts, Paul’s missionary journeys, he was followed around and hounded by Jews who stirred up the people. Eventually they tried to kill him. They tried to get other people to lock him up. That’s the idea of this word, persecution, to pursue, to chase after, to insult, hound, press, drive away.
But us as Americans, because we live in a nation that has really adopted a lot of Christian values, though those Christian values, in the minds of the Americans, they wax and they wane. We probably are not, at least now, not in danger of being dragged out of church or out of our workplace and imprisoned or stoned, because we’re living and speaking in a Christian way.
What we should expect as American Christians, if we are reflecting these Beatitudes that Jesus portrays, I think at the most basic level, we should be at least drawing the disdain of the world by insults, however small or great, whether you’re made fun of or not using foul language in the workplace, not joining in on inappropriate jokes, not joining in on gossip. Maybe you draw insults for being honest and not cutting corners in the workplace, not joining in on complaining, complaining about parents, complaining about work, complaining about the boss, the man. I think at the basic level, if we don’t join in on those things, we’ll draw the insults of the world.
They don’t like when people act righteously, it bothers their conscience when they see somebody else doing that. And so they want to try to press you into joining in with them. They’ll be shocked, as we read out of 1 Peter, that you don’t join in with them in those things. You will almost certainly draw the indignation of the world when you refrain from engaging in those sinful practices. It might just be light insults, but it will happen.
But if you take your Christian behavior from just passive to active, which is where Christ calls us to, and you not only don’t participate in those things, but you then turn and call them for what they are. You call them out for the sin that they are, then you will most certainly draw fire from the people around you. Even if you live this way before your family, especially some of you have unbelieving family, and you seek to walk righteously to call sin for what it is, you’ll definitely draw the persecution of those people.
For the final brush stroke of this painting, Jesus makes clear that a true kingdom citizen, he will be one who draws the persecution of the world. So that’s just a little bit of an idea of what persecution is, what it might look like for us, and that if we really do live that way, if we really do have a likeness to the portrait Jesus paint, we will be persecuted.
So that’s a little bit of what it looks like, but there’s more wrapped up in just this one little word for persecuted. The word is a participle, like many of the other Beatitudes, but Jesus makes a grammatical change here from the rest of them. All of the other ones are present tense, but here it’s a perfect tense participle and one commentator, Lenski, notes that this change in verb tense, it changes the meaning from a normal passive to a permissive passive. We might translate it this way. Blessed are those who have allowed themselves to be persecuted, or blessed are those who have endured persecution. They endure because they have allowed themselves to be persecuted.
So this would be those who subject themselves to persecution and endure it. This makes me think of John Bunyan, the pastor who wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress, among other things. He was imprisoned for over 12 years for preaching the gospel, but this persecution that he endured 12 years in prison is exactly the kind of persecution that Jesus is talking about here, because he really subjected himself to it, because John Bunyan could have at any point told the authorities, I won’t preach anymore, and they would have let him out.
He was imprisoned because he wouldn’t stop preaching and so he really subjected himself to this imprisonment. It’s one thing, when you’re minding your own business, you live like Christ wants you to live the quiet and peaceful Christian life, but this is a step further, this is one who willingly enters into a situation where they know persecution’s coming. They willingly open their mouth to press back against the kingdom of darkness, to press back against sinful coworkers, neighbors, friends, families.
They say what they know to be right, thus subjecting themselves to persecution and enduring it. This kind of person doesn’t shrink back. They press in and they endure. Jesus says blessed is the one who puts himself out there where he will most certainly be persecuted. Now I don’t mean that you need to go looking for people to persecute you and go looking for situations to put yourself in. This is a passive verb still. But when you find yourself in a situation that you could: one, either join in on the sin or two, walk away, refrain from joining in on that sin, or three, speak up against the sin.
What Jesus is talking about here is the latter; speaking up against it, willingly saying something when you know you’re going to receive the disdain of the world, you’re going to get pushback, you’re going to get persecution, even on a light level. Not just avoid joining in, but doing what you know to be right. Allowing yourself to be persecuted, subjecting yourself to it, not going and looking for it, but subjecting yourself to it when it comes like John Bunyan did.
It is when we endure this kind of persecution. We can be certain we fit this picture that Jesus paints here. When we endure, when we subject ourselves to persecution, when we have this response from the world, we can be certain that we share a likeness to the portrait Jesus has painted here. That is, persecution indicates that you are a true citizen of heaven, but there is a qualifier to the text here that Jesus gives, and that is blessed are those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness, that includes a lot.
We talked about, a few weeks ago, hungering and thirsting for righteousness. We talked about really that that is a broad category. It’s really a buffet of things that we can hunger and thirst for and come and be satisfied and work out that hunger and thirst, all the one another commands. This certainly includes a lot, but it also excludes some things, which is why Jesus puts this qualifier here. This qualifier excludes things like being rude and obnoxious even about our Christianity. You can have a righteous cause and stand on the side of righteousness, but have a poor execution of it.
I think back to when I was a kid and there was the people known as Westboro Baptists. I didn’t even really know much at the time. I was a young kid, but I do remember seeing these on the news. They were protesting at the funerals of homosexuals. They might have been right to disdain this sin, but holding up Bible verses condemning the people who had died. Protesting at a funeral, that’s, that’s not Christ like, that’s not standing and the doing something for the sake of righteousness.
Persecution indicates kingdom citizenship, persecution shows personal identification, and persecution provokes eternal joy.” Bret Hastings
That’s not grieving with those who grieve. That’s poking people in the eye with a stick when they’re already hurt. In the same way, even reciting Bible verses to people, if you’re rude and obnoxious about it, unloving and then they turn and, and insult you or worse, you can’t say, you can’t wear the badge of, I’m enduring persecution for Christ’s sake. I’m gonna, this is going to embolden me to continue to do that. No, we need to be known by our love and our winsomeness and our graciousness towards people.
Yes, confronting sin and, and giving them those Bible verses, but not in a rude and obnoxious way. We can’t follow people around and, and hound them about the gospel and then when they turn and, and bite us, cry persecution. Several commentators, they also mentioned that this excludes persecution for causes that are not inherently righteous in and of themselves. For example, if you are very outspoken about your Second Amendment right to bear arms and then someone insults you or worse, that isn’t suffering for righteousness’ sake.
I know sometimes as Americans, maybe even particularly as Coloradoans, righteousness and godliness and gun rights go together, but that’s not true, or if you wear a MAGA hat and you are persecuted, that’s not included in this, or if you have Republican signs in your front yard at voting times and neighbors egg your house. That’s not persecution. Does anybody egg houses anymore? I feel like it’s way too expensive to throw your eggs at a house. Find other ways to insult somebody.
But if, if that happens, things like that, that is not what Jesus is talking about here. They might be worthy causes and you might be just and right to promote those. But drawing insult and persecution from the world for those things, talking about those things, promoting them verbally, drawing the disdain of the world, that is not what Jesus is talking about here.
The previous Beatitude should be at the forefront of our minds. Are we seeking to make peace between men and God with the gospel of peace, confronting sin, speaking truth, making right judgments, calling people to repent and live lives in accordance with the gospel of peace. That’s what’s in mind here, not things like gun rights. It’s the one who, like John Bunyan, is concerned about preaching the gospel, who doesn’t cave to persecution. He doesn’t give in, he doesn’t give up, but continues to make peace, declare peace, the gospel of peace, even if that means more in persecution, and then endures.
This is the one who can be certain he has a likeness to the portrait Jesus paints here. This one can be certain that he is a citizen of Christ’s kingdom. “Blessed are those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness. Theirs and theirs alone is the Kingdom of God.” So persecution indicates kingdom citizenship. That’s point one, and that brings us to the second reality of persecution, that Jesus wants us to learn here. Point two: Persecution shows personal identification.
Persecution shows personal identification. Look at verse 11 with me, Jesus says, “Blessed are you when people insult you and persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of Me.” Some take this to be another Beatitude, but I don’t see it that way. It’s it is similar to the flow of things, but it’s also dissimilar, that uses the same word persecuted.
That’s a reason that I don’t think it’s another Beatitude. It uses the same exact word for persecuted, but it breaks the pattern in several ways. It doesn’t have an explanatory clause for why they are blessed. And this one is drastically different grammatically. Jesus goes from the the third person, those who are, to the second person, you, is a plural you, you all, this verse is very personal compared to the other verses. It’s too different in my mind just to be a ninth Beatitude. One Puritan commentator says, that Jesus repeats himself here because this last Beatitude, this statement, “Blessed are those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness.” Jesus repeats himself here because this statement is so incredible or unbelievable or radical.
Jesus here, this final Beatitude could be interpreted as quite radical by the people. And Israel was no stranger to radicals. Many rose up claiming to be the Christ and would lead revolts against Rome. The political radical was something that they were familiar with. They still heard recent stories of people being slaughtered because they were rising up against Rome. One of Jesus’s disciples was a political radical, formerly. Jesus here would have appeared to many to be radical, but this is a very different kind of radical than they were used to.
This was a radical commitment to following the law, loving God and loving your neighbor; dying to self was at the heart of the law they knew, but is never described in this way. The people there listening, they might be thinking, really, happy are those who are insulted, hounded, driven out of town, pursued until gone. Happy are those people! Those are the ones who stand in favor with God, they would think to all the Old Testament Scriptures and think, no Jesus, blessed is the one who sits in Israel, ruled by an Israelite king.
Blessed were those who sat under David’s kingship, Solomon’s kingship, another king, not driven from their homes, oppressed by the Romans. What Jesus is describing here is intensely radical religion to the Jews. What Jesus said here shocks us. Happy are the persecuted, really. It would have shocked them even more. But again, we have to submit our thinking to our brilliant Lord here. This is the declaration of truth. This is the reality of things, even if we don’t see it through our fleshly eyes. He tells us the way things really are.
All the Beatitudes, but especially the incredible nature of this one, is why Jesus repeats himself. But he does so in a way that takes it out of the realm of theory, and he puts it in the realm of reality for his disciples. He goes from stating an ideal, he’s already painted the picture, he’s finished the portrait in verse 10, and he goes from stating the ideal, painting this picture, to looking at his disciples and I imagine him looking at Peter, James, John, and Andrew.
Looking at them, he’s declaring to everybody this third person theoretical person of Christ’s kingdom. But then he looks at Peter, James, John, Andrew, his other disciples, and he says, “blessed are you.” He’s not just declaring blessing on this theoretical person. He looks at them and says, “Blessed are you when you are persecuted, when you are insulted, when people say all kinds of false things against you.” This takes it from the realm of theory to the realm of reality. And those sitting there, Peter, James, John, Andrew, any others who were there, they would have known that in their heart of hearts, as the Spirit testified with their spirit, that this was them. They would have been comforted by this.
Jesus makes it personal for those who are sitting there, and if this is us, this is for us too. He makes it personal for us. He wants to personally assure us. Blessed are you when people insult you and persecute you. They would have been assured with all the other promises Christ made in the Beatitudes as well. They would have been assured by this, as Jesus looked at them and told them this, that they stand in the enviable position of divine favor. No question about it. Jesus was speaking to them personally.
But then Jesus says, Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you, malign you, not if, but when. This really moves it out of the realm of theory. It’s not like Jesus saying, yeah, people might persecute you if you’re this kind of person. No, Jesus says, when; this is how the world will respond to you and when it comes, you will be blessed. The disciples needed to learn this lesson because the truth that he is teaching them now, is going to keep their hearts encouraged when persecution comes. And it is coming in just a few short months, years. They needed to know.
As we read out of 1 Peter earlier, we could hear those same words, Peter reciting these same things to other people. But this verse is, is also personal in another way. There’s a sense in which the Jews of the day, they could have thought that they were being persecuted as a group. They were being persecuted for their religion as a group. But Jesus really, he doesn’t want us to look at a certain group that we might identify with that is undergoing persecution and feel good that through that group that’s being persecuted, we’re being persecuted as well because we identify with that group.
Even if we just took the example, I think, of during COVID times, you had Grace Community Church enduring some hostility and persecution from the government, or we can think of even James Coats up at Grace Life Church in Canada. Obviously, we identify with them doctrinally and in many ways we’re very likeminded. But when James Coates was sent to prison for keeping his church open and preaching, we can’t look at that situation and say, I identify with that, therefore I’m being persecuted too.
We can’t look at a group that we identify with and, and identify with any persecution happening to that group and say, yeah, that’s, that’s me enduring that persecution. We might even think of our church. Our church receives insults for trying to do what is right. Even just recently as yesterday, reading something about our church, insults, false accusations. People think we take our Christianity here too seriously. They make false accusations, insult us as elders, insult our church. You shouldn’t feel a great degree of comfort that this is you. This is you enduring persecution.
If the only persecution you endure is being a part of a church that receives online insults. If you stand up and you defend righteousness and then that draws direct fire against you, then yeah, you can put yourself in there. Jesus says happy are you when people insult you personally, when they hound you personally, chase you and drive you away. If you not just identify with our church because it receives insults and false accusations, if you take that a step further, you defend righteousness, they go from insulting the church to insulting you, then that’s what Jesus is talking about here, personally identifying in the persecution, not just from a distance.
But Jesus continues the personal emphasis here. When he says, “Happy are you when people say all kinds of false things against you because of Me.” Jesus wants his disciples to know that persecution is personal. When they get sent out into the world, it will hate them and reject them and chase them and pursue them and hound them sometimes until they’re dead.
Persecution is personal, but it is a personal rejection of Jesus Christ, whom we identify with. And I think Jesus speaks this personally to his disciples to bring them comfort. Flip over briefly with me to John 15. In verse 12 through 17, Jesus assures the disciples of his love for them in John 15, and they are his friends. He’s laying his life down for them. That’s how much he loves them and cares for them. And then I think Jesus goes on to prepare them for the persecution that is ahead. But he does so by helping them see that their persecution is because they are his friends, because they are true children of God and identify with him.
That is persecution indicates true faith, the right relationship with God, Jesus Christ, identification with Jesus Christ. But let’s just read verses 18 to 21, John 15:18 to 21, “‘If the world hates you, know that it hated Me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, because of this the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you, ‘A slave is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you; if they kept My word, they will keep yours also. But all these things they will do to you for My name’s sake, because they do not know the One who sent Me.”
Jesus comforts his disciples with this. He says the world will hate them, because the world hated him. And they hated Jesus because they didn’t believe in the father who sent him. Implied in that is that the disciples do know Christ. They do know the father who sent him, that their identification with Christ and with the father is substantive. There’s a spiritual reality there.
They are being persecuted, because they do know the one who sent Jesus, that they have been reconciled to God and that they are now his sons. This persecution indicates friendship with Christ, sonship, and indicates heavenly citizenship, identity in Christ. That’s what Jesus wants to assure his disciples of. You can go back to Matthew, but on your way, stop at Mark chapter 10, Mark chapter 10.
In Mark chapter 10, we will read verses 28 and following. But as you turn there, this is the occasion where the rich young ruler, he’s just asked Jesus what he must do to be saved and Jesus told him, sell everything and follow me. But the rich young ruler went away sad, because he had great wealth. And then Jesus told his disciples that it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to be saved. And they all marveled at Jesus’s teaching and said, “Well then who can be saved?”
And Peter pipes up and speaks in verse 28 says, “Peter began to say to Him, ‘Behold, we have left everything and followed You.’ Jesus said, ‘Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or farms, for my sake and for this gospel’s sake, except one who will receive one hundred times as much now in the present age- houses, brothers, sisters, mothers and children and farms, along with persecutions- and in the age to come, eternal life.’”
Notice, kind of seems out of place, but Jesus throws in there, with persecutions. Along with giving up all those things, enduring persecution is also something that ought to comfort our souls, that we know Christ. Enduring persecution shows that we personally identify with Christ more than our mothers, brothers, sisters, more than our belongings. We’re clinging to Christ, and persecutions reveal the reality of that. Persecutions show that we personally identify with Christ, and this should encourage our hearts that we know him, that we truly are saved.
So go back to Matthew chapter 5. As you’re turning there, when Jesus told the parable of the soils, he talked about the, the soil, the hard packed soil of the path, that when the seed falls on that path, the birds come and steal it away. It never even penetrates the soil. But then he talked about the rocky soil, that the seed was immediately received with joy and it sprouted immediately, but when persecutions came, it withered away and didn’t produce any fruit.
Persecution is one of those things that really reveals what’s in people’s hearts. And when you stand with Jesus, when you stand for righteousness, you stand up for what is right. What the Bible says is right. You bear up under insults. You choose Christ over your family. You choose to identify with righteousness over your mother, father, son, daughter and you do what is right and you bear their scorn.
Well, if that’s you, then rejoice, because it means that you are his and he is yours. Rejoice that the gospel roots go down deep, unlike the rocky soil you’re enduring through that your roots go down deep and you produce the fruit of endurance. So persecution is personal. When we endure persecution for righteousness’ sake, we’re doing it because we know Christ and he knows us. We are his, he is ours. Persecution shows personal identification with Christ, and our hearts should be comforted that we do indeed know him. We bear a likeness to that portrait Jesus painted in the Beatitude.
So we have been encouraged by the fact that persecution indicates kingdom citizenship, persecution shows personal identification with Christ, and now finally, point three, persecution provokes eternal joy. Look at verse 12 with me. Jesus says to his disciples after he tells them that they will be insulted, that they will have all kinds of false accusations brought against them, persecuted, driven out. He says, “Rejoice and be glad for your reward in heaven is great. For in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”
Jesus says, Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you, malign you, not if, but when.” Bret Hastings
Right here what we have, these first couple words, rejoice and be glad are the first two imperatives of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. His first two commands to his disciples that Jesus gives in this sermon. Rejoice and be glad when you’re being insulted, when you’re being chased and hounded and driven out of town. Kind of like, think of, I don’t know if you’ve seen any of the, the videos of the protests and how people treat law enforcement in Minnesota right now. They’re just, they’ve got signs, they’ve got insults. They’re trying to drive those people away. That’s what Jesus has in mind here. That’s what happened to the early Christians.
The early Christians were treated like ISIS, is being treated in many parts of our country, right now. When you’re treated like that, rejoice and be glad. Rejoice is a word that means to be in a state of happiness and well-being. To be glad is a word that means to be exceedingly joyful. Just to give you an idea of of the level of joy for these words, the same two words are used together in just a couple other places in Scripture.
They were found where we read earlier out of 1 Peter chapter 4, where Peter said, “But to the degree you are sharing the sufferings of Christ, keep on rejoicing, so that also at the revelation of his glory you may rejoice with exaltation.” You think in the midst of the great suffering the the people that Peter wrote to, the people who had been dispersed all throughout the known world because of persecution, you think Peter found comfort in these words and was trying to share that same comfort with them.
He wanted to comfort them the way Christ had comforted him here, in the Sermon on the Mount, he encourages them, keep on rejoicing, even though you’ve endured much persecution, keep on rejoicing with the same kind of joy that we will have when Christ returns. Keep on rejoicing so that, also, at the revelation of his glory, you may rejoice with exaltation; the kind of joy that we’re going to have when Christ returns, the exceeding joy, the great rejoicing, that’s what we’re to have in this life even as we experience persecution.
The second place that both of these words are used together is in Revelation 19 at the marriage supper of the Lamb. Revelation 19:7 says, “let us rejoice and be glad and give the glory to Him, for the marriage of the Lamb has come and his bride has made herself ready.” So the kind of rejoicing with great joy that we are going to do in heaven with Christ at the marriage supper of the Lamb. Think about your wedding day and how happy you were and the joy that you felt. That’s just going to pale in comparison to the marriage supper of the Lamb. The joy that we’re going to have, Jesus says that’s the kind of rejoicing you ought to do now, even when you’re persecuted.
If you’re treated with contempt, insulted, persecuted, chased, hounded, how can we possibly rejoice with this kind of gladness and joy? Well, Jesus has really already salted the ground with his last two points, which give us great joy. But he wanted to punctuate this even further with a couple reasons we ought to rejoice and be glad. While persecution can be devastating and painful, we can rejoice and be glad.
Jesus gives us a couple reasons that we can do that. The first, this is because of our great heavenly reward. If you want to turn that into a sub-point you can, our great heavenly reward. He says rejoice and be glad for, the first reason, for your reward in heaven is great. In the Greek the word, great, is actually put at the front of that phrase. Great, your reward is great in heaven.
Jesus speaks of a great reward. This is not the Greek word mega, which would indicate a large size, but this is the word, polus. It does refer to something great or large, but it’s great or large because of a large number of things put together. It’s used to refer to things that are a mass quantity of things. So in a sense of a great speech or a long speech, it was so because of the many words, or a great people, because of the number of people. If you have many coins, you have a great treasure.
Our reward in heaven is great, because it is innumerable, it is exceedingly broad, it is manifold. Our reward consists of a mass quantity of things in heaven. As I thought about that, I just decided to start listing things that I thought we could put into that category. In our reward in heaven, what are some of those things going to be? And I’m just going to read through some of these, but I’m not going to give you the numbers, because I got 36.
I numbered them. I’m going to go through them just to add up, stack up our great reward. I’m not going to give you numbers, because I don’t want you saying I missed number six, point A, but I just want to go through these because as we endure persecution, when we sit down and contemplate our great reward and we just list these things, it starts to put in the scales. It starts to balance out the spiritual reality of what we’re enduring.
So the first eleven come from just this section in the Beatitudes. We talked about citizenship in heaven. That’s what we have to look forward to. Grace, eternal grace, forgiveness, comfort, a clean conscience, shared ownership of the earth in the new kingdom, coheirs with Christ, justification, righteousness, the ability to pursue righteousness with the promise of satisfaction, mercy, the privilege and ability to see God. The privilege and the right to be called sons of God, adopted as his sons, we get to enter into the joy of our Master, into his blessedness.
I also looked at one other passage, Revelation 21, that I drew the rest of these from, but the reward that we have to look forward to is no more death, no more mourning, no more sin, no more crying, no more pain. The curse is gone. We’ll be perfected and glorified. Our bodies will no longer be limited by the curse. All things will go, go back to being easy and not toilsome.
We’ll be able to see the world as God intended and the beauty without sin. Our hearts will be sanctified. No more sinful thoughts we’ll truly have the mind of Christ free from sin, always thinking rightly about God and others. Our wills will be sanctified. We’ll always do what’s right. Our emotions will be sanctified. We’ll always feel what we’re supposed to feel. We’ll never be subject to sinful fear.
We’ll be given a place in the New Jerusalem, the Holy City, where we’ll enjoy worshipping him and gazing upon the beauty of God with our physical eyes and our spiritual sight. We’ll experience worshipping him perfectly in perfect truth, in spirit and in truth. Our hearts will be enraptured with the love of God as they ought to be. We’ll be given access to the tree of life to always be satisfied, the river of life.
We’ll roam the earth freely, come and go from this city without threat. We will work the earth as God intended for Adam to keep it and to glorify God forever, through our work. We’ll have the privilege and the ability to explore God’s creation that he has made without physical restraint, without the veil of sin on our minds, we’ll dwell with perfect joy in God, perfect fellowship with God, and others will know him.
He will know us perfectly, we’ll dwell in perfect unity and peace and fellowship with God and others. We will enter into the eternal blessedness of our God, who is exceedingly blessed in himself. And we will always be in a state of rejoicing as Jesus explains here. We will enter into his eternal blessedness. We will always be in a state of well-being and exceeding joy for all eternity.
That’s just looking at the Beatitudes in one other chapter of Scripture. This is just a small piece of the manifold reward that Jesus speaks of. It is exceedingly broad. Our reward is innumerable and excessively great. And it is when we list these things, when we go through persecutions, we list these things, we remind ourselves of this truth. This is our reward, and it helps put our persecutions into perspective.
Whatever level of persecution we endure, even if we are chased and hounded to death, we can rejoice and be glad as we think about our great reward in heaven. Paul had this perspective when he wrote to the Corinthians, in 2 Corinthians 4, in verses 16 to 18, he said, “Therefore we do not lose heart, but though our outer man is decaying, yet our inner man is being renewed day by day. For our momentary, light affliction is working out for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison, while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; For the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.”
Paul endured some pretty serious persecution. I wouldn’t call it light by any means, but he does. He knows when he puts the momentary persecution on the scales of eternity, all of his persecutions, which are far greater than ours, they are but dust on the scales that he can blow off. And Jesus here he commands us that we can rejoice with exceedingly great joy in persecution, because our reward in heaven is great.
Our reward is an eternal weight of glory, that we can’t even comprehend. We can’t even imagine the total breadth of. So rejoice at that, beloved, when you endure persecutions. Next, Jesus encourages us to rejoice and be glad, because of our prophetic likeness. So if you want to put sub-point B: Your prophetic likeness. The prophets were regarded by the Jews to be heroes. We’re drawn to hero figures in our culture.
There’s, there’s been comic books forever, people who are drawn to hero figures, those who have courage to stand up to evil, who say what needs to be said, denounce wickedness, promote righteousness. We’ve got many of these figures in our American culture, our superheroes. But in the Jewish culture, they looked to the Old Testament and the prophets like Moses and Elijah, Isaiah and Jeremiah. Those were their heroes.
And if we just take Elijah, for example, he was insulted, persecuted, accused of wickedness by Ahab and Jezebel. He was literally driven away, hounded. They tried to put him to death. They sought his life. He had the courage to come to Mount Carmel to face off against 450 prophets of Baal, and really the Lord gained victory in that. But he also destroyed those 450 prophets himself, killing all of them as God commanded him. He denounced Ahab’s wickedness, condemned them for it. He fought for righteousness and for this reason he was looked at as a hero.
We love hero stories. We admire them. We look up to them in a sense, we wish we could be them, have this kind of courage that they had to have the opportunity to stand for truth and justice like they had. And Jesus tells Peter, John, Andrew, those who were there with them, really by extension us through this Scripture, that we should rejoice and be exceedingly joyful when we are persecuted, when we endure, because that means that we stand in the company of the heroes of the faith.
We stand as one of those in a long line of people who stood and were persecuted for righteousness’ sake. We stand with them. When Martin Luther was being tried at the Diet of Worms, he was being tried for really preaching the true gospel and confronting the, the Roman Catholic Church. He didn’t go in there thinking he was Superman. He really wrestled and, and was fearful, but in the end, he stood firm with these famous words. “I cannot and will not recant for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand, I can do no other. May God help me. Amen.”
I don’t think Martin Luther went into the Diet of Worms thinking that he was going to be looked at as a spiritual hero for the rest of his life or for the rest of church history. And when we endure persecution for righteousness’ sake, Jesus is encouraging us with the present reality. Those are the kind of men that you stand with, men like Martin Luther and Elijah. It’s no small thing to be counted among that company of heroes, a Christ chief among them. Yes.
So persecution, it provokes an eternal joy in us, because they provoke us to think about the eternal weight of glory, our great heavenly reward. But it also provokes us to think about our spiritual heroes, those who stood before us. We stand on their shoulders, we stand alongside them, and that ought to bring great encouragement to our hearts. But that brings us to some concluding thoughts.
As we close out this series on the Beatitudes, I want to stop and consider as we think about this portrait of a kingdom citizen that Jesus paints; I want us to stop and consider, is this you? Do you have a close resemblance to the portrait of the kingdom citizen that Jesus paints here? Have you come to recognize that you are spiritually impoverished, that there’s nothing that commends you to God, that you desperately are in need of his grace or your loss?
Have you mourned your sin, repenting of it, turning from it, hating it, and been comforted by the Holy Spirit? Are you marked by meekness, that is kindness, restraint and calmness in the face of conflict? Do you hunger and thirst for righteousness, setting aside the things of the world, chasing after the things of the world, to hungering and thirsting for righteousness and chasing that? Do you have compassion on people who are hurting and you move to relieve those hurt?
Are you seeking to be pure in heart, thinking righteous thoughts, engaging your will to accomplish those righteous thoughts, bringing your emotions into alignment behind those things? Are you a peacemaker? Do you seek to bring peace between God and man with the gospel, helping reconcile others to God and to one another? Is that you?
And then the final confirmation that you really do bear a likeness to the picture that Jesus paints here. Are you persecuted for living this way in the world? If you’re not subject to even the lightest insults for being this kind of person, then you probably aren’t this person. You really need to examine your heart. Maybe your repentance and faith are necessary. Maybe you’ve been a false Christian on the wide and easy road, just drifting down this current of cultural Christianity on your way to hell. You really just kind of morph to whoever you’re around. I mean, yeah, generally you maybe act like you’re supposed to, but it really draws no persecution from the world.
The true kingdom citizen will experience and endure persecution. So examine yourself, take time to do that, and if you do find yourself to be drawing the persecution of the world, even in mild forms, then rejoice and be glad in that. It shows that you are Christ’s. It means that you have a manifold reward awaiting in heaven. You are a kingdom citizen. You identify with Christ and he calls you friend, and it shows that you stand in the company of the heroes of the faith. If you endure, you’ll be given the crown of life. So, beloved, take heart. If that’s you, take heart. Keep walking faithfully as Peter commanded them to do. Keep on rejoicing and excel still more. Let’s pray.
Father, I pray for any of those who are here today who don’t know you, particularly those who really, they’re deceived and they think they know you. They think that they are this person when they’re really not. I pray, Lord, that your Spirit would reveal in their hearts how they fall short of these things. And to some level, we, none of us, perfectly resemble this kingdom citizen. And so that final test is helpful. Are we persecuted? Are we insulted for standing up for what is right?
Do we bear your likeness and in turn bear the scorn of the world and receive the hatred of the world because of it? Any who don’t know you today, Lord, we pray that you would convict them by your spirit, reveal that to them that they might humble themselves before you and, and cry out for forgiveness. Cry out in faith and find mercy and begin to to live in such a way that identifies with you and in your suffering. And for those who are here who I know endure persecution from their family just for showing up to church, disdain from their family, because they don’t spend time with them and they come to church instead, even things like that.
We pray that those who do endure persecution in this church, that they would rejoice greatly, that they identify with you and you call them friend, that their reward will be great. There’s an eternal weight of glory awaiting them and that they stand in among the likes of men like Elijah and Martin Luther and the prophets of old. May these things cause us great rejoicing, Lord. We pray that you would work this joy into our hearts by your Spirit, in Jesus’ name, Amen.