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Preacher: Ross Macdonald
Scripture: Matthew 5:8
Well, as we return now to Matthew 5 and we pick up where we've left off a couple weeks ago, we begin here the sixth beatitude, Matthew 5, verse 8. Martin Lloyd-Jones in his studies on the Sermon on the Mount introduced this beatitude with the following, we come now to what is undoubtedly one of the greatest utterances to be found anywhere in the whole realm of Holy Scripture.
Anyone who realizes even something of the meaning of the words can approach them only with a sense of awe and complete inadequacy. That's Martin Lloyd-Jones. Maybe you're doing a double take. This is one of the most profound verses in all of Scripture.
This is one of the greatest utterances that the Holy Spirit breathed out in His Word. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. That is quite a statement. And I hope by the time we conclude this morning, you'll agree with Lloyd-Jones' sentiment that this indeed is a profound verse and one of the many verses perhaps that strike us with a sense of awe, but truly this sense of inadequacy.
Who are we to comprehend and understand these things? Well as we begin the sixth beatitude, we also remember that this beatitude follows the earlier beatitudes that we've seen. If I could put it this way, we're now in the second table of the beatitudes.
We're past the halfway point. We began with those who are poor in spirit, and those who are poor in spirit recognizing their emptiness, their inability to help themselves or to merit anything in the face of God, therefore mourn.
They mourn over their inability. They mourn over their offense, and therefore they're brought low. They're meek. And these meek ones, needing so much the mercy and grace of God, begin to hunger and thirst for a righteousness that they cannot produce within themselves.
And so as they hunger and thirst for this righteousness, they become merciful. Why? Because they've received this mercy. They've received this righteousness. And then, a result of having this mercy in their life, they now have purity.
And they desire to be pure. In fact, the Lord, by His Spirit, is renewing them in ever greater ways, conforming them to the image of His Son. And so they go from one degree of purity of heart to the next degree, just as they go from one degree of glory to the next.
And then God declares that in this way, those who are pure in heart will, at the last, and as we'll see in some ways even along the way, but ultimately at the last, these ones, these ones who are pure in heart, they shall see God.
So let's consider this in two parts, really just cutting verse eight in half. First, who are the pure in heart? What is purity of heart? And then secondly, what does it mean to see God? What is the sight of God that Jesus explains in verse eight?
So we begin with the first part. Blessed are the pure in heart. Well, what is purity here in verse eight? Purity, as a biblical term, appears heavily in Exodus, where we just were. However, we didn't encounter it very often because really it's the second half of Exodus where we find it throughout.
And then, of course, in Leviticus. This is a ritualistic term that often speaks to ceremonial cleanliness. So the idea of purity is something clean or something that has been cleansed. And we found roundabout glosses like something without blemish, something undefiled, something that is not mixed.
It's not compartmented or sort of fragmented, as it were. It's something whole, something pure, something clean. This is the idea of biblical purity. Maybe some of you this morning, you left the breakfast table and you had pure maple syrup, 100 maple syrup.
It wasn't cut in with anything. When I met Alicia, she didn't like pure maple syrup. She liked the artificial corn syrup. And it was almost a deal breaker for marriage. I was, I don't know if I can, if you think this is better than the real stuff.
But since then, she's repented and she's come around and now she knows that there's no comparison to what is pure. Matthew presents in the Gospel Pharisees as not pure, but actually hypocritical. In this sense, they appear to be pure, certainly before everyone else.
Even the disciples feel a little ashamed around the Pharisees, a little dirty and we really got to clean up our act. But Jesus sees right through that exterior. He recognizes that their purity has no substance.
Their purity, in other words, is hollow. In fact, what's within is a sepulcher, a tomb. There's a defiling corpse within, though it's whitewashed and clean without. And so the Pharisees and Matthew are held out as those who had inner corruption, impurity in their lives, in their walk, in their heart before the Lord, in their mind, in their thinking in regard for others.
And they camouflaged this inner corruption with all manner of religiosity. And so this kind of impurity is something that Jesus, throughout the Gospel, preaches against. He speaks to a purity that is born of God, a purity that doesn't work from the outside in, but truly the only way biblical purity can come about, from the inside out.
From a work of the Spirit of God, from a new heart cleansing the life and bearing forth fruit. So this carries over to the phrase here in Matthew 5 .8, pure in heart. A clean heart. A heart that is not divided against itself.
A heart that doesn't hold together hypocrisy. It doesn't have a place that is competing with other affections and other desires apart from the Lord. Now what is the heart? That's purity, that's cleanliness.
What about the heart in verse 8? Well if we were to summarize the way the Bible speaks about the heart, so often the heart is far more than what we mean by heart. You text message a heart emoji, you simply mean I love you or I'm affectionate towards you.
I made the mistake a few days ago, I meant to send an emoji with sunglasses and I hit the heart and sent it to a brother and I'm like, oh, I'll just leave it. He knows who he is. I mean it, I love him, but sometimes I reserve the heart for the wife.
We mean heart usually in a romantic way, it's about our affections. Well the biblical use of heart is far more than that. The biblical use of heart, if we were to summarize how it's used, really it's the center of our personality.
It's the substance of our character. It's not just our affections, it's our mind. Certainly it can include our thought life, it can include our affections, really the whole seat of our emotions. Not just warm fuzzy affections, but every aspect of our affections, the good, the bad, the ugly.
It includes our will in that sense. Various passages will entail any one of these aspects. The heart in the Bible is the source of all of our activity. You could say the heart is that which is definitively true of us.
What is most true about you? That is your heart. Not what eyes can see, not what ears pick up, but what is true before God, that is your heart. The very core of your disposition, the very center of your desire.
If we press further we find that purity of heart, this language, this phrase, purity in heart, is often held together with the conscience, especially in the New Testament. When we look up the idea of purity or a pure heart, it's often with or very close to a concern about the conscience.
Let me demonstrate this for you. 1 Timothy 1 .5. Now the purpose of the commandment is love from a pure heart from a good conscience. These things are put in parallel. Love from a pure heart from a good conscience.
So the idea of a pure heart is in some way parallel to having a clean conscience, that which is true in the most reflective and inner dimensions of my life. My conscience is clean, therefore my heart is pure.
Or my heart is pure because my conscience is clean. As David could say in Psalm 17, Lord, You've tried me, You've searched my heart and found that I am clean. That's something that David prays. I've never prayed quite like that.
I usually pray, Lord, You've searched me, You know how evil my heart is. 1 Timothy 3. Deacons are to hold the mystery of the faith with a pure conscience. So again this language of purity, cleanliness, being attached to a conscience.
And here deacons are to hold the mystery of our faith with this pure conscience, a clean conscience. 2 Timothy 1 .3 Paul says of himself, I thank God whom I serve with a pure conscience. And then Titus 1 .15, to the pure, all things are pure.
But to those who are defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure. Even their mind and conscience is defiled. Do you see? So to the one who has a pure heart, the one who walks in a pure way, everything is pure.
They recognize and have a way of seeing everything rightly before the Lord. But to the defiled, they're unable to even see clean things as clean. They think everything must be treated cynically. Everything is hypocritical.
Everyone's crooked. Everything is sinful. And their mind, their conscience in this way is defiled. Why? Because their heart's defiled. Their conscience isn't clean, therefore their heart is not clean.
And so we see here at first glance, Christians are those who are to have pure hearts. Blessed are the pure in heart. Well, who are these pure in heart? They're Christians who have a clean conscience. Christians who guard the purity of their conscience.
Christians who don't bowl over the red flags and the warnings that their mind brings up before them. So when there's that red flag, when there's that spike of concern, Christians take it to heart. They would have a pure heart, therefore they take their conscience to heart.
They live according to their conscience, even as their conscience is being cleansed. Of course, the Bible has far more to say about the heart than just the conscience. We know from 1 Samuel that we can only look on the outer appearance.
The Lord looks on the heart. Again, He looks on the very definitive aspect of who we are. Sometimes we pray as if that wasn't the case. We pray before others as if they can only see by the outside, but we ought to be praying to the God who sees all.
It's actually quite difficult sometimes to pray in that way. We can actually train ourselves, we can learn Christianese and have formulaic prayers, and we can pray in a way that God's only seeing us externally.
It's rather disarming, perhaps unnerving, to pray to the God who sees right down to the very core of who you are and what you desire. So we keep our hearts pure. Scripture says every issue of life flows from the heart.
This is why we're to keep our hearts. John Flavel, who wrote a tremendous book on that very topic, Keeping the Heart. And yet, Scripture is clear. The heart that we are called to keep is a depraved heart.
The heart that is called to be pure before God is a heart that is infinitely wicked. Jeremiah 17 .9, the heart is deceitful above all things. Desperately wicked. Desperately wicked. Give it an opportunity.
It becomes wicked. Who can know it? Jeremiah says. Who can understand? Who can fathom the depths of the depravity of a fallen heart? Evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemy.
Where do these come from? Jesus says in Matthew 15. Out of the heart these things proceed. Out of the very core of who fallen people are, these things proceed. Perhaps they don't always have opportunity.
Perhaps the consequences restrain the activity, but it's from the heart that evil thoughts, murder, fornication, theft, false witness, blasphemy, these things proceed. It's from the heart, from the stock, from the very fiber of who we are as fallen human beings.
Do you see? And so as a result of man's fall into sin, Paul says in Romans 1 .21, our hearts became darkened. Light is this picture of purity, pure light in Scripture. But our hearts in the fall became darkened.
They're foolish hearts. Once man was made upright with instinctive wisdom. He didn't need to go and study or try to discern. He could look at the world as God made it and infer all that he needed from God as Creator to understand who God is and what His character was like and therefore what His service was to be.
He had a wise heart by virtue of being made in righteousness. His heart was enlightened in that way, naturally, as naturally as it was beating. But as a result of his sin, that wise heart became foolish and that light became a horrific darkness.
In accordance, Paul goes on in Romans 2, in accordance with the hardness of your impenitent heart, you treasure up for yourself wrath in revelation of the righteous judgment of God. So the hardness, now the impenitence of the heart.
There once was a time where Adam's heart was effortlessly tender before the Lord. Every morning it would awake with rejoicing to do the will of God. We infer that just by looking at Jesus as the second Adam undefiled by sin.
It was His delight to do the will of God. That's how Adam was before the fall. He woke up and his heart was bursting. Bursting to be with the Lord. Bursting to serve the Lord God. Bursting to enjoy and worship in light of the glories of paradise surrounding him.
But now that once tender heart had become like a stone, hard, unable to turn, unable to repent, excusing, blaming, running, hiding from the very sight of God. And this fallen state has remained true ever since.
Hardness of hearts, inability to turn, a refusal to acknowledge one's sin, to acknowledge the truth, the sovereignty of God. And Paul says such a one is treasuring up, storing up the wrath of God on that great day.
So this is precisely why our hearts must be cleansed. This is precisely why the Gospel comes to us and says, we recognize that God demands a pure heart, but you cannot purify your heart. In fact, the more you try to purify your heart, the more you're defiled.
And yet God requires a pure heart and He's not willing that you should perish, so see He's made away for those who will repent and believe on His Son. Why? Because this Son is a high priest over all the house of God.
And in that function, in that capacity as the great high priest, what does this Son of God do? Well, Hebrews 10 spells it out. Having a high priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart, say a pure heart, a genuine heart, in full assurance of faith, having our hearts, our impure, defiled, dark, foolish hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, from an impure, dirty, defiled conscience, and our bodies washed pure.
You see, this is the result of the work of Christ. So God doesn't say purify your heart, then you can draw near. He knows you can't purify your heart. Clean up your act, clean up your life, then you can draw near to Me.
Now what does He say? Draw near to Me. Draw near to Me with faith, believing in the One that I have appointed and that faith is a repentant faith. Draw near as those who are poor in spirit, mourning, and the One who draws near in this way with a sincere heart that is yet defiled, that is yet impure.
Drawing near with true faith, but a wounded conscience, a defiled conscience. It's not even that you've drawn near in faith, it's who you've drawn near to. You've drawn near to the Crucified One, who alone is able to cleanse that defiled conscience, to wash away the impurity of your heart, to give you a righteous standing before God.
And so all of this carries over with the idea of being pure in heart, a clean heart. Going a little bit further, Augustine said the purity of heart here in Matthew 5 .8 is a singleness of heart. A singleness of heart.
To be single-hearted is to be pure. To be singular, not divided. So single-mindedness is actually a very important concept here. I think Augustine is right. If purity is single-mindedness toward God, a single pursuit without anything hanging on or taking its place, an exclusive devotion and focus upon God, if that's purity of heart, then impurity of heart is being double-minded.
It's having two hearts. It's having competing desires. It's displacing what is rightfully God's. This becomes a major theme throughout James, running in fact from chapter 1 all the way through. I won't spend time to do it justice, but James is very concerned about what is singular, what is whole, what is united versus what is scattered and divided and doubled.
He recognizes, as Augustine says, that purity of heart is single-mindedness. Impurity, being unclean, is being double-minded. So he says from the very beginning, does anyone lack wisdom? Again, we shouldn't read this just as a letter.
If we want to appreciate it more, we should read it as a wisdom writing. It's written almost in that genre. So themes evolve as words repeat, and he keeps layering the points that he's making. Does anyone lack wisdom?
It's almost keying in. Read it in this way. Would you have wisdom from this writing? Does anyone lack wisdom? Let him ask in faith with no doubting. Where is he going to go with this doubting? What's a doubter?
Someone who believes and they don't believe. Someone who believes and they don't believe. They believe now, but not now. Then, but not yet. Let him ask in faith with no doubting. Be single-minded in your faith with no doubting.
Why? Let not that man suppose that he'll receive anything from the Lord if he's a doubter. Why? He's a double-minded man. And a double-minded man, James says, is unstable in all of his ways. He can't commit or pursue anything in a straightforward way because he doesn't know how to be single-minded.
Therefore, the same way that he can only walk by faith and by doubt as a right foot and a left foot, he can't be stable or singular about anything in his life. Everything is that way. Everything is chaos.
He goes on in chapter 3 where envy and self-seeking exist. Confusion. You see this picture? Confusion. Doubling. Impurity. Every evil thing is there. What about the wisdom that we may lack? The wisdom that comes from God?
The wisdom that we should ask by faith with no doubting? Well, he says the wisdom that's from above is first pure. God doesn't give schizophrenic wisdom. God doesn't give an admixture of wisdom. That's what we do when we receive wisdom.
We approach it and we double it and halve it and divide it and make it chaotic. The wisdom that comes from above is first pure. God doesn't give wisdom as the old Looney Tunes cartoons. Elsie was asking me the other day about conscience.
She's like, is conscience real? Of course it's real. But is it a voice? She's getting at, well, is that God speaking? Is it a voice? Well, sometimes it might be like you're talking to yourself or you might have a thought that's almost like a voice in your mind.
Sometimes it's just a strong feeling or an impression. She said, so the conscience is real but it's not a voice? The conscience is real. It's given by God. And she said, oh, oh, I understand. It's like, it's like when the rabbit, she was thinking of Bugs Bunny, has the little one and like the good one and the bad one on the shoulder.
That's the conscience. And I'm like, well, not really. James would say, that's not wisdom from above. That's not how God informs our conscience. He doesn't say, let me give you the little, the little angel and the little demon and you kind of figure it out between the two.
No, the wisdom that comes from above is first pure. And so the beatitude in pointing us to this purity calls us to a single-mindedness. In that way, it opens up the kind of questions that actually bear our impure hearts, bear our defiled consciences before the Lord.
D. A. Carson makes this point so well. He says, it interrogates us with awkward questions. We're not reading it rightly if the questions don't get awkward, if they don't get heated. What do you think about, this is Carson, what do you think about when your mind slips into neutral?
Where does your mind go when you're not actively thinking about anything? How much sympathy do you have for obscenity, for dark humor, for worldly humor, even if it's really genuinely funny? How much sympathy, how much purchase does it have in your mind, in your affection?
Is that consistent with purity of heart? To what do you pay consistent allegiance? What are you loyal to? What do you, as it were, pour time and energy and resources to? What do you want more than anything else?
All of this speaks to the purity of your heart. To what extent are your actions and are your words an accurate reflection of what is going on in your heart? Are you doubled? Is your heart really craving and seeking and desiring things that your words and your actions are pretending as otherwise?
Or is there a one-to-one reflection? Where your heart is, where your conscience is, there your words and your actions are. That's purity. That's purity. Double-mindedness cannot recognize, as James goes on to say, that friendship with the world is enmity with God.
James sees that. This is doubled. This is divided. This isn't pure. This isn't unified. This isn't having rightly ordered desires under the Lordship of Christ. Double-mindedness doesn't know that friendship with the world is being an enemy with God.
And so having a singular heart means you don't blur everything together. Because you have oneness in your heart, you have singleness in your mind, everything else is divided for you. There's a right path and a wrong path.
There's a right way and a wrong way. There's what is righteous and what is wicked, what is godly and what is worldly. You begin to look at the whole world in that way because you have a singular mind and a pure heart.
But where you have two minds, where you have two hearts, where you have this doubled impurity, everything else becomes one. Everyone's on a spectrum. This isn't that bad. These relationships are okay.
This entertainment is fine. I know how best to filter. I can guard myself. I know what to do. Everything becomes one because you're doubled. It needs to be the other way around if we would be pure in heart.
Isn't that what God was trying to put before the Israelites throughout the Levitical law? This not that. This not that. This not that. Everything had to be separated out. The wise understood that this was how one lives with purity of heart before God.
Blessed are the pure in heart. It's an exclusive devotion. There's no mixture. There's full and total allegiance. It's being whole, united by the Lord God, united by His Spirit. As the psalm says, unite my heart to fear your name.
I don't want to have two hearts. One that fears you and one that fears man. One that loves you and one that loves the world. Unite my heart only to fear your name, only to love you. That's purity of heart.
Jesus says that these are the ones alone that see God. Blessed are the pure in heart for they only see God. Spurgeon says that the things of the kingdom are hidden from the double minded. They can't discern.
They're so unstable. They're so thoroughly leavened by the pollution of the world of flesh and the devil. They can't discern the things of the kingdom. They're carnally minded. They would never think of themselves in that way.
But to those who are spiritually minded, it's quite obvious. The things of the kingdom are hidden from the double minded, Spurgeon says. Spurgeon says, listen, I've seen rough sailors. I've seen blasphemers.
I've seen harlots. I've seen great sinners of every rank and file converted to God, brought to the Savior, saved by His grace, and in every instance they told the honest truth about their sin. They blurted out the saddest truth in an almost outspoken fashion when they were converted.
And I've often thought these ones were like the good ground of which our Savior spoke with an honest and a good heart despite all of that badness. Do you see? It's David in Psalm 51. He's got a wretched heart.
He's got a defiled conscience. And yet in Psalm 51, by owning and acknowledging this as he's mourning before the Lord, as he's crying out, cleanse me with hyssop branches. Make me clean. In that sense, his heart is actually pure.
In every way, someone who's recognized the grace of God and experienced the converting power of God is able to approach and regard their sin in this way. It glorifies God. And because it's God who's giving a pure heart, they recognize in some sense all these things, these wretched things, these aren't true of me now that God has given me a new heart.
I died to them in Christ. Now I live with Him. In fact, though this consumed my life and there's still consequences flowing from it, I'm a new creation in Christ Jesus. But then there are others, Spurgeon says, others.
And as soon as you talk about religion, they say, yeah, yeah, yes, yes. But they don't mean it. They'll always agree with you. But Spurgeon says, in my observation, God never seems to do anything to them but just leave them alone.
So easy to agree? Very well. Carry on. Spurgeon says, His grace will never be in vain. And that's a pure heart. And a pure heart is someone who rarely comes to double-minded men, unstable in all their ways.
And these are the ones that never see God. Someone pure in heart. As R .T. France says in his commentary, someone truly pure in heart is someone who loves the Lord his God with all his heart, with all his soul, with all his mind, and with all his strength, that's purity of heart.
How can you worship the true God with anything less than that? How can you worship the true God in sincerity and truth if you're double-minded in this way? If you come to him with two hearts, how can you worship him as you're meant to worship him?
Kierkegaard, he actually wrote this lovely little book, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing, kind of riffing on Augustine in some ways and James. He recognized that purity of heart is to be single-minded, to will one thing.
And he says, the reward of the good man is to be allowed to worship in truth. You see what he's saying? What's the curse upon the hypocrite? They can never worship God in sincerity and truth. What's the reward of the good man?
What's the reward of those who are pure in heart? The reward is they worship God in sincerity and truth. Even when that sincerity and truth is Psalm 51. That's David approaching God in sincerity and truth.
That's David the sinner with a pure heart and a pure conscience, you see? What do pure hearts do? Just a few applications before we go on to the second part of verse eight. Try to be brief with these.
What do pure hearts do as an encouragement, as an exhortation to all? Well, first of all, pure hearts meditate on what is pure. Would you grow in being single-minded? Learn how to make contrast. Don't have two hearts and two desires.
Don't have friendship with the world and supposed friendship with God. Unify your heart to fear his name, make divisions. And part of that then is pure hearts meditating on what is pure. Philippians 4, whatever things are true, noble, just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely.
There's virtue in anything. If anything's praiseworthy, meditate on it. Don't just notice it, fill your mind with it. Acknowledge it in a way that you don't quickly leave it. This is Paul's concern. This is a way to protect your conscience to, as it were, reinforce what is right.
Another thing pure hearts do, pure hearts love other pure hearts. Pure hearts love other pure hearts. First Peter, he's speaking of the purified. Since you have purified, he's speaking to the purified.
Since you have purified your souls in obeying the truth through the spirit in sincere love of the brethren, what? Love one another fervently with a pure heart, do you see? So those who have pure hearts love the purified with those pure hearts.
There's this love. This is part of us meditating, dwelling upon, praising things that are pure, things that are lovely. Another thing pure hearts do, do they pursue with other pure hearts? They don't just love other pure hearts, they pursue with them.
2 Timothy 2, flee youthful lust. So on the one hand, you're running away from something, but then also you're running towards something, you're pursuing something, flee youthful lust, but pursue righteousness, faith, love, peace with those who call on the Lord with a pure heart.
Who else is seeking to run, to fight the way that I am? I'm gonna run with them. I already love them because I've been purified by the truth, I have this fervent love for them, I'm meditating, I'm chewing on what is pure, and if they're running away from the lusts of the world, the lusts of their flesh, if they're pursuing righteousness and holiness, I'm running with them.
I'm gonna pursue with anyone who's calling on the name of the Lord from a pure heart. Who else? There's a lot more we could say about this, but I think we'll leave it there as we consider now the second half of verse eight, the sight of God.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. This is what Lloyd-Jones was getting at when we say this is a verse that makes us feel our inadequacy. Theologians don't really know what to do with this.
I was reading a little bit of a debate with some of the Dutch Reformed where this whole idea of the sight of God, what theologians have long called the beatific vision, the blessed vision, that sort of eschatological beholding of God.
And so this beatific vision is something that has interested theologians for the past 2 ,000 years of church history. And there was some intrigue among certain theologians in the Dutch Reformed tradition that seemed to not really have a place for it.
And the concern was they were so focused on this materiality of God's redemption on a new heavens and a new earth, they didn't really have a place for this eternal gaze at the glory and beauty of God.
And so Bavink and others were kind of put as it were on the hot seat. We really can't read through his systematics and find an adequate description of the vision of God. Those that rallied to his defense said, well, it's because scripture tells us very little about this.
So he doesn't want to engage in mere speculation. There is some sense in which we can only read what the words say, try to work out a few details based on other verses, and then just bow to the mystery of it all.
What does it mean to behold God in this way? What does it mean to see Him in a way that we're made like Him? This is where we feel the awe, the weight, the gravity of this verse. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
In this way, the sixth beatitude is a one-sentence summary of the whole fabric of the gospel. Within it, you have sort of an inferred fall, and then God's desire for purity, and then God's desire that He would dwell with His people forever, that they would be with Him, they would see Him.
And so you have almost the whole gospel contained within this beatitude, the need for a purity that is not now possessed in order to see God, which is the very purpose and express desire of our being.
The sight of God, the beatific vision. Theologians have long regarded this as the summum bonum, which just means the highest good, the greatest good. So good it deserves its own Latin phrase. That's how good it is.
It's not just good, it's not just the highest good, it's summum bonum, it's existentially good, profoundly good. And along these lines, it's been rightly claimed that to behold God is the ultimate purpose of every religion.
At the core of it all, at the acorn that springs all man-made efforts of religion, what is the chief desire? It's to behold God. It's to be intimate with the divine. It's to see and in some way partake of, or participate with, to be absconded with that which is beyond us, ineffably beyond us.
For imminence and transcendence to be wed together as one. That's a desire of all religion. Even in fact in statist ideologies and sort of what we could call an atheistic religion, this point is still not lost.
They seek to behold themselves as God. If they don't seek to behold something else as God, we would behold ourselves with ultimacy. We would become transcendent. We would be the Babel builders, the Ozymandiases of the landscape.
This is what Augustine referred to as this lust for dominance. What is that? A desire to behold God. There was a Soviet cosmonaut in 1961, Yuri Gagarin, who allegedly, when he made it to outer orbit, said, though it was never in the official documentation, said, I see no God up here.
I see no God up here. Someone later on wisely retorted, open your helmet, then you'll see God. He's not in the outer orbit. The outer orbit, the fathomless, ever expansive reaches of what is beyond was just a word that he spoke.
Open your helmet, then you'll see God, you worm. To behold God is the ultimate quest, the ultimate desire of every religion because to behold God is the apex of human aspiration. I can't put two final points on this.
To see God is what we were made for. To behold God as creature beholding creator, as sinner beholding savior, is the apex of human aspiration. It's the denouement, the grand finale of this whole drama of redemption.
To behold God, the very prospect of that, that the sight is our undoing for those humans that are fallen, as fallen beings. To behold God is our undoing. It's Moses' request in Exodus 33. Lord, show me your glory, right?
He's just being honest. This is all any human being ultimately wants. And when they go looking for anything else to satisfy, at the base of that pursuit is this. They wanna see God. They want to be with God.
They want something that completes them, that overwhelms them. And so the sight becomes our undoing. I remember early on and before I was a college dropout, I studied film. I wanted to be into cinematography.
And many of the classes we did anatomy of a scene. And I remember there was one, it still stuck with me all these years. There was one scene we did, a director I won't mention, a film no one should see.
But the scene, the whole movie was sort of a plot broken up in a series of dream sequences. And it was very well executed as far as what the feeling that the scene was trying to get across. And that's what we were studying.
It's two men in a diner and there's this one man who has just sweat pouring down his face. And he's talking about this dream that he continually has. And you get the sense that this is all actually within a dream.
There's things that aren't quite adding up. But he basically says, outside of this building, behind that wall, there is one that is waiting for me. And every time I see him, and it's the end. And he's out there waiting for me.
And I know that this is it. And so you get the sense that this is another repetition of that dream. But the man sort of looking at him sideways, they slowly approach and it takes about a minute as he's walking toward this wall.
There's this existential dread as he's approaching this wall. And you're wondering the whole time, is there gonna be nothing? Is there gonna be something? Is it just gonna cut? What's going to happen?
And so there's this almost painstaking, it keeps going to the wall, closing in, and then to him, closing in. And the tension is built up. And all the scenery is normal. Birds chirping, cars driving, it's the middle of the day.
There's nothing creepy about it. And all of a sudden, he closed in an unexpected moment. This figure comes out just in a moment and goes back. The atmospheric noise is still there, but in a way, he's completely muted and he faints.
And it seems as though he's died. It's been his undoing, that sight, as he knew it would be. And it was unavoidable. He had to draw near. And as soon as he saw it, it was his undoing. That's what it is.
And Moses cries out, Lord, show me your glory. And what does God say? You can't draw near to me. You can't behold this sight and live. It's your undoing. No man can bear that sight and live. That's what God says.
And yet all men were made for that sight. It's the apex of our desire. It's the desire underneath every desire. And so on the one hand, it's a sight that is our undoing as fallen beings. But on the other hand, it's the sight that is our making.
If we see it as fallen, we'll be undone, but we'll never become what we're meant to be if we don't see it as the redeemed. We're undone as fallen, but beholding God is our very completion, our very fulfillment.
It's what we were made for if we're redeemed. Remember this whole idea, grace restores nature, that great dictum from Bavink. We were created to behold God. Is that not obvious from the very first pages of Genesis?
The Lord God dwelt with man. It's why after the fall, when man is exiled from the presence of God, God's redemptive promise is, I'm going to bring you into a land and I'll be with you. Because that was the whole point all this time, that I would be your God and you would be my people beholding me, being with me.
And so in a perfect world, in the world of Eden, man dwelt with God, enjoying the purity of communion, undiminished bliss, the good of creation, unmarred with sin, unspoiled by corruption. And then even despite the loss of that perfection, the rebellion against that purity, the sinful rejection of that communion, God moves toward redemption in such a way that his people will be able to see him still.
And we must read all of that when we come to the high priestly prayer. And Jesus says, Father, my desire is that they whom you gave to me would be with me where I am and that they might behold my glory.
Why is that Jesus' desire? Because it's our desire. It's what we were made for. As Boving says, and I've already shared this with you in weeks past, the very opening of his book, The Wonderful Works of God, he says, man cannot be satisfied with all the whole of what the material world has to offer.
All men are really seeking after God. Every time you drive by and you see someone holding a phone in a sunset and they're snapping 300 pictures and none of them work, none of them capture it, they're seeking to behold the glory of God.
The problem is, as Thomas Watson points out, we can't endure a sight of glory more than we can endure a sight of wrath. It is our undoing in our flesh. But the saints in heaven, Watson says, will have capacities enlarged.
They'll be made fit to receive this vision of God. This is what the redemption will accomplish in the lives of God's people. They'll be so redeemed that they can behold God. And in that sense, as it was so instrumental for C .S. Lewis to recognize this, that every passing glimmer of beauty this world has to offer is not meant to be isolated and rested away from God as our creator, from the God who is the God of all beauty and glory.
It's not meant to be rested away like some toddler taking away something to go in a corner and stare down at. Every glimmer, every shard that fills us with awe and aesthetic wonder is meant to draw us from that to the one who made it, to the one who spoke it into being.
Now, of course, in this life, we are already being made fit to receive this vision of God. Second Corinthians 3 .18, we all with unveiled face beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord. So Paul says, even now there's this sense that redemption has begun.
We're awaiting that day when faith becomes sight, but in the meantime, we are, as in a mirror, beholding the glory of the Lord. And this is transforming us. We're now being changed from one degree of glory to the next.
And there's many other ways that we, as it were, behold God in some temporary partial way, even in this life, even in this fallen condition. The believer has some sight of God in his work of creation.
There's people that marvel at the created order. No one ought to marvel more than Christians. People by the millions drove to go see David Attenborough narrate the eating habits of some Amazonian species.
It fills people with natural awe. You don't have to teach a child to be engrossed and fascinated by critters. You have to beat it out of them. They're the ones going, look what I found. You know, yeah, drop that, go wash your hands.
We're about to eat. We kill that natural awe and fascination in children. We should actually learn from them in this way. That is amazing. I don't think I've ever appreciated carpenter ants in this way.
So we look at the world in a way that unbelievers cannot quite see God. They just see water, storms, large mouth bass, what have you. Christians see the marvelous works of a beautiful creator. The believer has some sight of God in history.
For the unbeliever, there's this smattering and there's sort of an open future. It's why they're willing to burn down cities like Minneapolis, right? The kind of future is unpaved and it's for those who are strong enough to take it by force.
Those who will lie, deceive, cheat, steal, rob, kill, destroy, whatever it takes to get our policies, as it were, pushed through. But the Christian looks at history and recognizes, here I see the hand of my God orchestrating everything.
Not just in the largest details of empires rising and falling, but down to the hoofs on horses. That's my God. And I behold him. Believers have some sense of seeing God by enjoying his presence. Moses was not allowed to see God, but Hebrews 11 said that he endured as one seeing the invisible God.
So there was some sense in which Moses was seeing God. There's some sense this morning in which you who are in Christ are seeing God. Unbelievers can't understand this, but you know what it is to enjoy his presence, to feel his warmth in your life, his presence and power in your life.
In that sense, you're seeing him. In fact, part of that is believers in some sense see God amidst the people of God. When you feel as though it's difficult to see God, to know him, to feel his presence, you come into the midst of his people and you feel his presence there.
You see God's work, you see God's glory displayed in the lives of his loved ones. How many times am I the only weirdo like this? You go to a conference like the Bolton Conference and you sit there and usually it's the second line of the first hymn for me.
Everyone is standing, the whole place is full. We've all prepared and worked out our weekend so that we could come sit under the teaching of the word of God and we're all there in our hundreds belting out these hymns and I almost can't even sing the second line.
I just look around and breathe it in. This is glorious. This is the presence of God. In that way, I'm beholding God, though I can't yet see him. Then of course, individually, a believer in some sense beholds God just by looking at their trials, looking at their blessings.
They recognize his movement, his providence in their life. It helps them behold him. I see what you've done. Maybe I've even seen why you've done it, Lord. Thank you for your faithfulness. So the encouragement from all these things is don't just wait to see God.
Behold him now in the ways that you can. Take pain to behold him now in the ways that you can. As one Puritan said, often look upon him with believing eyes who you hope to see with glorified eyes. Often look upon him with believing eyes who you hope to see with glorified eyes.
And with these glorified eyes, we are told, though we are now children of God, it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when he is revealed, we shall be like him. Why? John says, for when we see him, we shall be as he is.
So there is this glorious hope, this glorious beatific vision, this encounter that defines the highest good of our humanity, what it means to be human, what it means to be a creature before the creator.
It's the sight entering into eternity in which for the first time, I know myself to be known I know even as I'm known and I see what I've never fully known. Well, we understand all of these things. We have some things to say about, well, are we going to actually see God?
I think I'll save those for tonight. There's a question that's somewhat related to that. And of course, that's a question you may have. Well, if God's infinite and invisible, how will I be able to see him?
The theologians have debated this for a long time. And I think scripture is very clear. Man shall not see God and live. 1 Timothy 6 says, no man has seen or can see this potentate, this king over all.
But in some sense, we see God. And the answer to that, I think we can explore further tonight. But let me say at least this about this future sight, this future blessedness. Bavinck writes on this, this future state, this future blessedness.
He says, the state of blessedness is we finally contemplate. We finally understand and now fully enjoy what at the very height of our powers could only be a splinter. Full contemplation, full understanding, full enjoyment.
Bavinck says, the redeemed see God, not to be sure with physical eyes. We'll talk about that tonight. But rather in a way that far outstrips all revelation given to us in nature and in scripture. So in all the ways that we behold God now, all of that is paled.
Now we in the very foremost of our being see, and in this way fully comprehend God, are fully comprehended by God. And for the first time, not by hoping, not by hungering and thirsting, but by feasting, we enjoy the presence of God.
We know God when we see him. We see God when we know him in this way. Directly rather than indirectly. Immediately rather than in mediated ways. Unambiguously rather than through a fog or through a glass darkly.
And purely, purely we behold him as face to face. The pleasure of seeing God, Jonathan Edwards writes, is so great, so strong it will fully possess our hearts. No wonder your heart has to be pure. No wonder only the pure in heart can see God because when the pure in heart see God, their heart is fully possessed by him.
There's not a molecule in your heart at that site that is left for anything else than the bliss and wonder of the beauty of God. Your heart's fully possessed by him. It fills us to the brim, Edwards says.
It squeezes out the last vestiges of sorrow. There's no longer any room or any corner for anything to be against joy. There's no darkness that can bear this kind of light. That's what we await. And so, coming to a close, blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.
What is necessary to see God? A pure heart. A pure heart, a clean heart, a cleansed heart. Without these things, you will not see God. Beholding him will be your undoing on that day of judgment. What do you need to see God?
You were made to see God, so what do you need to see him? A clean heart. A cleansed heart. A conscience undefiled by evil works. Pursue peace with all people and holiness, the writer of Hebrews says, without which no one will see the Lord.
The pure in heart are those who pursue holiness. They pursue it with others who are pure in heart, calling on the name of the Lord. And often, these ones in their pursuit aren't the mighty warriors, they're not the Samson's defeating all of their indwelling sin with the jawbone of a donkey.
No, rather they're like deer panting for water. You want to know what it looks like to pursue holiness? You want to know what it looks like to have a pure heart? Looks like a deer panting for water. It looks like the psalmist crying out, don't hide your face from me.
My whole life is about seeing your face, so don't hide it from me now. David says, don't take your spirit from me. Don't take your spirit from me. My whole life is to see you. Don't leave me now as a deer pants for the water.
My soul pants for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. That's someone who wants to see God. In fact, he says it, when will I come and see God? I'm hungry, I'm thirsty, I'm longing, I'm weak, I'm prone to wander.
When will I see God? This is the one who goes to the fountain filled with blood, plunges their filthy hands within it, purifies their conscience and cries out, help me Lord to seek your face. Let me pursue holiness.
Give me a purity of heart within so that I can see you. So what must be done is clear. Draw near to God and he will draw near to you. As we said, you don't draw near because you clean up your act, you put things together, you wait till everyone is well regarded and they think very well of you and then you, in a very covert way, begin to approach God.
No, those are the ones who never see God. Maybe the church beholds them and admires them, but they never see God at the end. Draw near to God, he'll draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners. Purify your hearts, you double-minded.
Well, what is James getting at? James knows as better as anyone, the fact that you can't ultimately purify your own heart doesn't mean you just go on and sin. The command is still there, cleanse your hands, purify your heart, don't be double-minded.
He said, I can't purify my heart, the Lord knows that, but you don't go on and sin, you don't say I'm gonna wait for God to zap me like some static shock, and so I'm just gonna keep going the way I'm going and doing the best I can.
No, cleanse your hands. The Puritans often spoke of the sort of preconditions unto conversion. There was a lot of controversy about that, but I think they were banking on verses like this. Cleanse your hands.
You're drawing near with a defiled conscience with dirty hands. Part of cleansing them is drawing near in a Psalm 51 way, and so as you do so, you see just how impure, how corrupt, how sinful your nature really is, and therefore as you draw near, you're drawing near to God for mercy.
You're drawing near to Him because of this impurity, and that means you're drawing near to Him as one who's poor in spirit, as we said. You're mourning, you're meek, you're hungry, you're thirsty, you're like David.
Create in me a pure heart, O God. David's drawing near and he's saying, I don't even have a pure heart, so his prayer is, create in me a pure heart. This heart won't do. As Spurgeon said, you can just as easily put a living, pumping heart into a marble statue as you can ask a fallen man to purify his own heart.
This is a work of the Spirit of God. You let the Spirit of God do what He has undertaken to do, what He has promised to do for those who draw near. Poor in spirit, mourning and meek. If you draw near in that way, seeking for God to give you a pure heart, He will give it to you.
You cannot blame God, nor anyone, nor anything else but yourself if you haven't drawn near in this way. There's some vestige of pride, some refuge of dignity that will not let you draw near to be cleansed in the fountain filled with blood.
So I say this to the Christian, I say this to the struggling, to the doubting believer, draw near to God and He will draw near to you. Yes, He resists the proud, but He gives grace to the humble who may ascend into the hill of the Lord, who may stand in His holy place, the one who has clean hands, the one who has a pure heart.
We could put it this way, the one who has the Spirit of God creating in them a pure heart, cleansing their conscience from the defilement of sin, making them humble before the Lord, giving Him a desire, giving her a desire to see the face of God.
And we recognize Psalm 24 also says, we're not the ones who ascend to the holy place with the pure hearts, not first and foremost. We do ascend into that holy place with pure hearts and clean hands, but it's only because we're in communion by faith with one who's gone on before us, the one who ascended the hill of the Lord, the one who entered into the holy place, the one who had perfectly clean hands and a perfectly pure heart was the one who had nails put through those clean hands, and his heart is emptied of its blood upon the cursed tree.
That's the one who entered the holy place of God, and by repenting of your sin and trusting in Him for salvation, you ascend to the holy place where God will be seen. Amen? A Puritan said Moses was hidden in the rock in order to see God, but there's only one rock for us to be hidden in that we may see God, and that rock is Christ.
And so if you would see God with a pure heart, go to the foot of the cross. Consider the one who became your sin and shame that you might have a conscience cleansed, a heart purified, that your treasure and hope and all of the earth would be on that great day.
I can't help but think of David Farrar, and I hope despite the pain and the mourning of what he's leaving behind and the concerns about how all these things will be cared for in his absence, I hope that that pales and the volume decreases as he considers as a faithful servant of God, he is about to behold the face of his maker, the very presence of the one who loved his soul to everlasting.
Is that not glorious? We ought not to have a frown among us for those who believe at the funeral of David Farrar. He's gone to be where we desire to be. He's gone to see the Lord who gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from every lawless deed, purifying for himself his own special people.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for your Word. We thank you, Lord, for the beauty, for the awe, for the glory that's held forth. Lord, these are just words.
These are syllables strung together. They cannot open the oceanic depths of what they contain. Lord, to behold you, what a hope, what a living hope. Oh Lord, as John says, everyone who has this hope purifies himself even as you are pure.
May we as a church purify ourselves, Lord, by clinging to the sacrifice of Christ our Savior, by being renewed in the power of your Holy Spirit in light of that sacrifice, being brought into ever greater communion with the one who alone beholds God and sits at the right hand of the Father, beholding all of his glory.
May we be hidden in him as Moses was hid in the cleft of the rock. Lord, it would be world enough for us to see the afterglow of your glory. What an amazing thought that our destiny in Christ as repentant believers is to actually see your face.
For those here, Lord, whose sight of you will be their undoing, for those with proud hearts, for those with friendship in the world stained by the world, for those walking in the flesh being carnally minded unto death, won't you speak the light of the gospel and break up that stony heart, grant repentance in faith with a new heart, a heart of flesh, a clean heart.
Cleanse a conscience defiled by the bondage of sin. For your people, Lord, give us a renewed hatred for sin. Let us be ever about lopping off and gouging out anything that would prevent us from rightly seeing you, from hungering and thirsting after your word, from being meek and lowly and poor in spirit, Lord.
For truly only those with missing arms and gouged-out eyes will be those who see your face. So help us in these ways, we pray, O Lord, in Jesus' name, amen.