“Blessed Are the Persecuted”

The Eighth Beatitude and the Kingdom of Heaven

Well, this morning as we turn now to Matthew 5 and begin verse 11, well 10, and then next week verse 11, we are closing out the Beatitudes. We come now to the eighth Beatitude. Verse 11, which we'll consider next week, will carry on the theme that we begin today.

So this is sort of a part one kind of sermon, but I want to do justice to the fact that this is now completing the unit that we call the Beatitudes. Verse 11 really elaborates this eighth and last Beatitude and then becomes a bridge to verses 12 and following.

And so it's important that you understand there's a lot of practical consideration, practical application that'll be in reserve for another week as we turn to verse 11. But this morning, we want to begin this final Beatitude.

And when we're looking at the eighth and final Beatitude, we're reminded of the very first Beatitude. There's a repetition we talked at the very beginning about the bookends of these eight Beatitudes, and they're bookends in a few different ways.

Let me perhaps remind you of that. First, and perhaps most obviously, you have a repetition of that last phrase. You have a conditional statement here, or at least a statement with two separate clauses.

The first part, in literary terms, we call the protesis. The second part is the apotesis. The apotesis is the then part, or perhaps the explanation or elaboration of the first part, the protesis. And the apotesis, this last part, is the same in both the first and the last Beatitude.

Verse 3, the first Beatitude, Blessed are the poor in spirit. Why? For theirs is the kingdom of heaven. And here, our last Beatitude, verse 10. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake.

Why? For theirs is the kingdom of heaven. So you have a repetition that closes out the first and last Beatitudes. This makes what we call an inclusio. In other words, this is marking out a literary unit in Matthew chapter 5.

As bookends, you'll also notice that both the first and the last Beatitudes have present tense verbs. We said this at the beginning, just a reminder. Notice what's being said. For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Theirs is, right now, presently, theirs is the kingdom of heaven. That's true in both the first and the last Beatitude. But for every Beatitude in between, all the verbs in the apotesis are future. They shall inherit, they shall be filled, they shall be comforted, and so on.

And so you have the present tense, and the first and the last, and then everything in between is oriented toward the future of what shall be. So there's a certain tension that introduces this idea of the kingdom of heaven.

Now we're going to unpack this in more detail as we work our way through the rest of the Sermon on the Mount. Matthew's Gospel, in particular, has a certain oceanic depth when it comes to understanding the kingdom of God.

It's a theme that runs through Matthew, and it's certainly present here in Matthew 5 through 7, perhaps foremost in chapter 13. And so we're not going to unpack a lot of detail about the nature of the kingdom this morning.

We'll have plenty of time to elaborate and explore how Matthew is treating the idea of the kingdom of God in due time in Matthew 5, 6, and 7. But I want to point out this tension that the Beatitudes brings to us.

There's a certain tension between the kingdom being present and the blessings of that kingdom in many ways being future, yet to come. And this is a tension that we find permeating so much of the time that Matthew spends discussing or presenting the kingdom.

This becomes clear especially in chapter 13. There's a tension between heaven and earth, the kingdom of heaven yet dawning upon the earth. There's a way that the land and the earth and the way that that relates to heaven has a certain creative tension.

You are in presently the kingdom of heaven. The kingdom of heaven belongs to you who are disciples of Christ, and yet you will inherit the earth. Somehow heaven is here, but the inheritance of the earth is yet to come.

So whenever we're dealing with kingdom, we acknowledge this tension. There's transcendence, yet also imminence. There's something near and yet something far. Something in you, but also something yet to come.

Something now, but also something not yet. The kingdom of heaven is at hand, yet also the kingdom must come. The kingdom is not for all those who say, Lord, Lord, Jesus says they will not enter the kingdom, and yet presently the least in the kingdom is greater than the greatest man born among women.

If Jesus is casting out demons by the finger of God, then surely the kingdom has come upon you, and yet the king will say to those on his right hand, come you blessed of my father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you.

Do you see the tension? It's both here and not yet. It's both in you and yet to come upon you. It's both now when you're in it, and there's a sense in which you must still enter into it if you're blessed of the father.

And so, this is showing you some of the tension, some of the complexity of the nature of the kingdom of God. Well, as we venture off, let me just begin a definition to help you conceptualize the nature of the kingdom.

How can we define the kingdom of God? Well, first and foremost, and this is vital as we make our way through the rest of the Sermon on the Mount in weeks to come, you cannot understand kingdom apart from king.

To speak of a kingdom presumes there is a king, and you cannot speak of a king without respect to the realm or to the rulership of that king. So, when we're talking about a kingdom, we must have a king, and we must have a realm or a rulership of that king.

The kingdom of God, then, has often been meant to speak of the power, the presence of the king, and certainly that's very helpful, very classic definition by J .P. Meyer. Kingdom of God is meant to conjure up this dynamic notion of God powerfully ruling over His creation, ruling over His people in particular, and over the history of both, the history of creation and the peculiar salvific history of His people.

This point has been put succinctly by almost every writer. The kingdom of God emphasizes God ruling as a king, and henceforth, His action and His relationship to those ruled is what is primary. Very helpful, but we can go further.

W .D. Davis and Dale Allison, their attempt at a definition. For Jesus, they say, the kingdom of God, which was at the very heart of His proclamation, signified not the territory that God ruled or will rule, but rather God's activity as a ruler.

God's presence has come. If by the Spirit of God I cast out demons, then surely the kingdom has come upon you. Why? That's the activity of God the king, you see. But we can go further. The term in the context of kingdom is used in so many ways, and this is why I bring this up now.

I'm not going to dive into this at all. We're about to move on entirely from it. But as we work our way through Matthew 5, 6, and 7, we're going to keep coming to this language of the kingdom. And when we do, we need to tread carefully.

We need to be sensitive to what's being communicated. There's a scope to the term that Matthew doesn't want us to miss. It's much broader. It encompasses a lot more than just the rulership or the activity of God as king.

I was reading this week a very helpful book by Tobias Allo on this very point, and he designates several ways that kingdom is used in the Gospel of Matthew. He says, first, it's used personally to speak of God as king.

So when you talk about the kingdom, it's perhaps a metonymy for just speaking of the king himself, his personal identity. It's used abstractly to speak of his office or his dignity, his majesty as king or the majesty of his kingdom.

It's used spatially, very important. It's used spatially to speak of the place or the rule of God. This tension between heaven and earth, it's almost exactly the reason why Matthew has the phrase kingdom of heaven.

The other Gospel writers speak of the kingdom of God. Matthew describes it as the kingdom of heaven. He wants to show the spatial tension between God's rule breaking into space and time in his creation, the kingdom of heaven yet coming to earth.

And then also, there's a collective dimension of kingdom. What we could call kinship, the belonging, the denizens, the citizenry of this kingdom, those who belong, those who enter, those who have this king and have allegiance to this king.

And in all these uses, they're bound together. And so I sort of end that here. Tuck that away. Put that in your back pocket for the weeks to come. The question we have before us here in verse 10 is simply this.

To whom does this kingdom belong? To whom does this kingdom belong? Of whom does the kingdom of heaven consist? And in the last beatitude, we have the answer, to those who are persecuted for righteousness sake.

To those who are persecuted for righteousness sake. Who belongs to the kingdom of God? Of whom does the kingdom of heaven consist? Those who are persecuted for righteousness sake. Not those who suffer because of their own sins, not those who suffer unjustly, but those who suffer because of righteousness.

Those who are persecuted because of righteousness. Of them is the kingdom. For them is the kingdom. The experience of persecution, of course, varies in many times and in many ways. But the point being held out in this last beatitude, this crown of the beatitudes, is that persecution is normative for the people of God.

Persecution is normative for the people of God. How normative? If a follower of Christ never experiences any kind of persecution, we should ask whether they are truly righteous and whether their righteousness is being displayed.

Because when righteousness is being displayed, righteousness is, of course, an irritant. It causes friction. It causes hostility. It feels like accusation. It sends the conscience into alarm mode. And people will quickly shout down and harangue, harass, move against, speak against.

This is a natural effect of displaying righteousness. So if a believer has never at all experienced any kind of persecution, any kind of hostility, the question that is burning is, is your righteousness being displayed?

Do you even have a righteousness to display? Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake. This is normative. John Stott, he says, the condition of being despised and rejected, slandered and persecuted is as much a normal mark of Christian discipleship as being pure in heart or being merciful.

Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness will suffer for the righteousness they crave. We talked about these eight Beatitudes. Again, there's this literary beauty in how they're portrayed. We talked about there being essentially two tables in the Beatitudes.

We break them into two units of four. The first four Beatitudes have alliteration. They all begin with the Greek letter P for the poor in spirit and the mourning and the meek and those who hunger and thirst.

Both units broken into four Beatitudes each have 36 letters, 36 words in the original Greek, so showing us the sort of symmetry between the two. Both the last in the first table and the last in the second table, the fourth and the eighth Beatitude speak of righteousness.

And those who are poor in spirit, those who are mourning their sin, those who are meek and humbled in light of what God has done for them and therefore they hunger and thirst for righteousness, will be persecuted for the righteousness they crave and have received.

Do you see? That's the logic of the Beatitude. You began poor, you were humbled, you're hungering, you're thirsting to be righteous, you're crying out to God, create in me a new heart, a clean heart. What's the effect of that?

Having received mercy, you're merciful. Now you're pure in heart. Now you're seeking to make peace. Your righteousness is on display. And what's the effect of that in a fallen world? Persecution. Persecution.

So then fiery trials come to the people of God. This is a norm for Christianity. And yet we naturally view it with disdain. Again and again and again we're told, do not fear. Expect this. In this world you will have trouble.

We must suffer many things to enter the kingdom of God. But when it comes, as Peter says, we count it strange. He says don't count it strange, this fiery trial that is to try you. Don't count it strange that you're experiencing persecution.

For Peter, he says, it's strange when you're not suffering as a Christian. That's when you should be like, this is bizarre. It's been a year and a half since I've experienced any kind of hostility or affliction.

I haven't suffered at all. What's wrong with me? I thought I was a Christian. We count it strange when we don't suffer. Paul says it's at the very heart of our fellowship with Christ. You get the sense that neither Peter nor Paul nor any of the followers of Christ could define what it means to be a Christian without part of that definition being suffering.

This is what Paul has to say in Philippians 3. Remember in Philippians 3 he's describing his sort of testimony as a Christian. He's saying what he was before Christ saved him by his grace. He said, I was a Pharisee of Pharisees, born on the eighth day of the tribe of Benjamin.

I was the ultimate Jew. And he says, and for all that gain, for all of my training, for all of my insight, for all of my zeal, I count it all rubbish. I count it all loss when it's compared to the knowledge of the glory of Christ.

And now he describes his heart, his desire, his zeal as a Christian. He says that I may know him and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his suffering. What a word, the fellowship of his suffering.

He says to Timothy, you've carefully followed my doctrine. You've carefully followed my manner of life. You followed my purpose. You followed my faith. You followed my long suffering. You followed in my love.

You followed in my perseverance. You followed in my persecutions. You followed in my afflictions. In other words, this is what it looks like to follow Christ. And Paul is saying to Timothy, you followed me as I follow Christ too.

No wonder you followed me into persecution. Blessed are those who persecuted for righteousness sake. It's a fellowship. In fact, he goes on, not only have you followed me in my persecutions, what happened to me at Antioch and Lystra and Iconium, what persecutions, he says, I endured, and out of all the Lord delivered me, yes, and all who desire to live a godly life in Christ will suffer persecution.

Now notice what he's saying. He talks about faith. He talks about love. He talks about perseverance, but there's only one word that he's repeated three times, persecution. In the Hebraic mind, that's emphasis.

He doesn't say faith, faith, faith to Timothy. He doesn't say love, love, love. He says persecution, persecution, persecution. What is Paul conveying to this young leader in the church? Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake.

Timothy, if you would follow in the faith, don't shirk back from persecution. If you were of the world, Jesus says, the world would love its own, yet because you're not of the world, I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.

This is why you shouldn't count it strange. You're no longer of this world. In 1 Peter, what's counted strange among those who don't know God? Peter says, they counted strange, you don't run with them in the same flood of dissipation.

What happened to you? What got into you? Ross has become a lousy friend. He's not fun to hang out with anymore. We don't want to hang out with him anymore. One of my closest friends, the best man at my wedding, and you know, we used to spend endless hours, we'd get off shift working at the grocery store, endless hours at Denny's, lumberjack slams till 1 a .m., with our Bibles open at the diner counter, talking about all the amazing things we were seeing and finding, talking about Reformed doctrine, and he was baptized, and we were so close, I remember planning this mission trip with him.

We just took off for a week and drove up through Maine and filled his old grandmother's Buick trunk with Bibles and tracts. Any place we stopped, we would just go and witness to people, and we would prepare devotions and have times of prayer and fasting.

This is just, we had this great relationship, this great zeal. I remember vividly sitting at this restaurant in Leominster that's now since closed, Border Grill and Bar, and sitting across from him, and just feeling this fire, this hunger for the Lord, and just looking across the table, and just tears in our eyes and saying, there's just so much more.

He's so glorious. And I remember seeing him begin to sin, and to stumble, and to backslide, and begin to push away, beginning to drop away. I can still vividly remember going downstairs, he was dodging me for weeks, and his door was locked, and he had people in there that shouldn't have been in there, and I could smell the weed coming through the door, and I just said, what are you doing, what are you doing?

And that whole little circle of former friends, they count it strange, they count it strange. If you were of the world, the world would love its own, but you're not of the world, therefore the world hates you.

Remember what I've told you, Jesus says, a servant isn't greater than his master. If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also. So when will this persecution be most evident? What does this last beatitude say?

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake. This persecution will be most evident, most genuine, when it's a persecution that is for righteousness' sake. In other words, the world will hate us most when we look like our master.

The world hated me, Jesus says, and no servant's greater than his master. The more you look like me, the more in your life of sanctification you're being conformed into my image, the more you're going to stick out like a sore and ugly thumb to the world.

So when we live as Christ lived, when we look as Christ looked, when the servant becomes like the master, that's when persecution begins to rear up. It's not so much our religion, not some sort of status that becomes persecuted, it's our righteousness.

There are so many Christians, just saying, oh, we're not persecuted at all. There are so many Christians that they sort of shout down any sense of people in the West bemoaning slight hostilities or slight friction, slight interference from the powers that be.

There's a sense in which instead of shouting that down and saying it's really not that bad, why don't you seek to live righteously? Because that's when you'll actually find that affliction, that suffering, that hostility.

Why did Cain slay his brother? Was it because his brother was religious? No. It was because his brother was righteous. That's what 1st John says, Cain, who was of the wicked one, murdered his brother.

And why did he murder him? Because his brother was righteous. And his works were evil. That's why. It's because of righteousness he was slain. And then what does John say in light of that application?

Don't marvel, my brethren, that the world hates you. Why will it hate you? Because its works are evil. Your works are righteous before God. That's what's being held out to us in these Beatitudes. The Pharisees and the Sadducees were never humbled by Christ's righteousness.

I don't know why there's this daydream. You have droves of people watching some show like The Chosen. They just think, oh, this is a Jesus I could get behind. This is a Jesus that I would be meek before.

Give me a break. If you were witnessing his kind of righteousness, you would do what we all would have done in our rebellion against God. You would have dragged him to Golgotha to crucify him. That's what men whose works are evil, whose hearts are inclined to darkness, do when the righteous one is in their midst.

Men hate the light. They love darkness. So let us not be deceived. Pharisees and Sadducees, these were the righteous men in the eyes of the people. When true righteousness came in their midst, they crucified it.

Paul was infuriated. He was a Hebrew of the Hebrews, as it were, a Pharisee of Pharisees. What happened when these Christians began to live out the righteousness that was put forth in the law because of the grace of Christ Jesus?

What happened when they actually had the joy and the freedom and the grace of God that the law could never give Paul in his pharisaical days? Was Paul humbled? Was he curious? Was he, I really want to know what's going on?

He was enraged. He was enraged. He was not impressed with the church's righteousness. He was enraged. He persecuted them to death. This is what happens when we look like our master. Don't marvel, John says.

Don't count it strange, Peter says. Paul writes in Galatians 4, in light of this conflict, right, the Judaizers are trying to convince the Christians to return to a form of Judaism, and with that there's a sense in which they won't have to suffer.

Well, when you get to reading Hebrews, that's certainly the context. You can sort of just go back to Judaism and then you don't have to suffer anymore. And the writer of Hebrews is saying there is no way back.

Now we, brethren, as Isaac was, are children of promise. But as he who was born according to the flesh persecuted him who was born according to the Spirit, even so it is now. Do you see what Paul is doing?

He's going back to Isaac and saying, here's the one that was born of the Spirit, born of promise. But the one that was born to sin, the one that was born of the flesh, Ishmael, persecuted him from his youth.

Paul is going back and he's saying, what did Isaac ever do to Ishmael? What did he ever do? He's just a baby. What did he do? Yet Ishmael is persecuting him, harassing him, bullying him, maltreating him, lying about him.

It causes this great scandal, this great division in the tent of Abraham. And Paul is looking at that and saying, from his youth he was persecuted and that's how it is even now. From its youth the church is being persecuted.

What did we do? We're just trying to have a pure heart and be peacemakers. What did we do to warrant this kind of persecution? And Paul says, no, no, even so it is now. It's always been this way for the people of God.

And so what's true of Isaac and Ishmael is true of the early church. Isn't that clear in Acts? You get to Stephen and then in verse 8 it says, persecution arose and the people scattered all through Judea and Samaria.

Doesn't say why persecution broke out, it just says that it did. Why? For the reason it always does. Those who are born of the Spirit will always be persecuted by those according to the flesh. In Psalm 129, the first two verses hold this out, that this idea from youth, what have we done from youth to warrant this kind of persecution?

Many a time they've afflicted me from my youth. Let Israel say, many a time they've afflicted me from my youth, that they've not prevailed against me. Just taking these words as they are, we might think that the psalmist is almost journaling out some ongoing abuse in his life, some frequent affliction.

Many a time, that's a prolonged affliction. From my youth, it's something personal. When I was young, when I was impressionable, when I was vulnerable, they afflicted me. You'd think he's almost writing about himself as one man, but look at what he's doing, he's calling the tune.

Many a time they've afflicted me from my youth, let Israel say, many a time they've afflicted me from my youth. Do you see what he's doing? He's using his own individual experience of suffering and he's saying, isn't this true, Israel?

Isn't this true, people of God? Many times we've been afflicted. From our youth, as the people of God, we've been afflicted. So it takes on this corporate dimension. It's not just about one man, it's about corporate suffering.

You see here first that God gives his people a testimony of persecution. So much of the psalms are written in this very way. Let the people of God now say, many a time they've afflicted me. God gives us songs of persecution, testimonies of persecution.

In other words, he wants us to reflect on it, to make it a part of our songbook, to stoke up our hope in his deliverance, to glorify him as the one who will vindicate our righteousness. The church history is a long series of crosses and persecutions, sort of pockmarked with short spans of revival and blessing.

Truly the church can sing, like the psalmist, many a time they've afflicted me from my youth. This is the history of Christianity. And so we sing about the suffering. We sing about the affliction. We sing about the persecution.

God doesn't write the psalms and say, all the songs need to sound like this, some 1920s carnival soundtrack, I'm happy, oh happy, happy are the days of the Lord. That's not how the book of Psalms is written.

Read Psalm 88. He knows the grieving. He knows the longing of his beloved one. He's bottling up their tears. You couldn't read Revelation any other way. There's this sense of how long, oh Lord. That's the cry that's filling, as it were, the throne room.

When will you come? When will you vindicate? When will you deliver? And in the midst, the songs of worship are also the songs of affliction. And from that, notice what's taking place in Psalm 129, the one man's suffering becomes corporate suffering.

And so God doesn't just give us testimony of persecution, he gives us unity in persecution. Let Israel say. In other words, however different our experience is, however unique our own sacrifices and sufferings in the Christian life may be, there is something unifying about the fact that we all must suffer to enter the kingdom.

And we all must suffer many things, Paul says, to enter the kingdom. It doesn't matter whether we're suffering because of the loss and the deprivation and the lack of impact, and so we're isolated in a hostile world, living under the shadows of our former glory, or if the church is burgeoning under the boot of some tyrant, the Holy Spirit, so unites our witness that corporately throughout the world, there's a sense in which we grieve with those who are grieving, and we rejoice with those who are rejoicing.

Doesn't it tug on your spirit rock heart strings when you read of the suffering of your brothers and sisters in other parts of the world? You read of tremendous suffering, accounts smuggled out of North Korea, basement churches in Saudi Arabia, tremendous suffering.

Don't you join into that song and say, from our youth we've been afflicted? Let Israel say, many a time they've afflicted us. So the psalmist is identifying his own experience of suffering, and he's making it corporate.

He's identifying, yes, so it must be, what does Paul say? We are, as it were, filling up the afflictions that are lacking in the body of Christ. That's how he viewed himself. If we're the body of Christ here on the earth, and Christ was the afflicted one on the earth, there's some sense in which we now, in our lived experience of faith, are even filling up those afflictions as His body on the earth.

What an amazing way to view himself. The corporate wounds are his wounds. The corporate suffering is his suffering. Do you see? The psalmist begins with his own affliction, and then he relates it to the suffering of all of the people of God.

And as he considers the suffering of all of the people of God, he brings that into himself. Now he's in solidarity with them. He seeks to suffer faithfully along with them. There's a sobering reality that we sit here freely to worship God, and elsewhere across this world at this very hour, there are people who are worshiping God in secrecy, in terror, with no sense of freedom.

There's a sense of actually putting your faith against your fear, of trusting in the Lord, knowing that even if He doesn't deliver your body, He'll deliver your soul. And so you'll trust Him. You're faithful unto death.

These aren't just hymns, the faith of our fathers. It's a lived reality. That's a sobering thought for us this morning. The Psalms open up this bloody history of the people of God, not so that we wallow, not so that we feel self-pity, but to rather stoke faithfulness to God.

Because, as we see, thirdly, God will deliver us from affliction. Many a time they've afflicted me from my youth, yet they have not prevailed against me. That's the song of the church. That's the song of the church.

Many a time they persecute me, yet they never prevail against me. That's the song of the church. Persecution may come, and yet the deliverance of God is never thwarted. The perseverance of God's people is never due to their brilliance, or their strategies, or their efforts to prepare.

It's always due to God's deliverance, God's faithfulness. How different it is to read a psalm like this. You don't see, as Derek Kidner points out, you don't see the people of God looking back on what they've achieved.

They look back on what they've survived. That's what he's doing in Psalm 129. Look at what God delivered us through. Look at how we've made it. We've ever prevailed because of the Lord. That's the testimony of the body of Christ.

Afflicted, Paul says, in every way, but not crushed. Perplexed, but not despairing. Persecuted, but not forsaken. Struck down, but not destroyed. Always carrying in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus would be manifest in our body.

Do you see? That's how Paul understands the Christian life. As the king, so the kingdom. If the king suffered and carried, as it were, this life of death, so that in him new life could be found, Paul reckons, as the king, so the subjects of the king.

As the king, so the kingdom. We too, then, carry always the death of Jesus in our body, so that the life of Jesus can shine forth, as it were. Treasure in this jar of clay. And in that sense, as Paul is saying, the church ever prevails.

The church ever prevails. Though there be those who hate her, though there be false sons in her pale, against or foe or traitor, she ever shall prevail. That's the song of the church. But how does this happen?

How does the church prevail? What's the logic of the Beatitudes as a whole? What's the logic of the eighth Beatitude? And this eschatological reversal of blessing. How could it be that the blessed ones are the persecuted ones?

Well, we're just going to lay out a broad foundation this morning. And again, a lot of the practical implications we'll discuss next week. But let's at least attempt to answer that question and maybe be exhorted by the answer.

How does the church prevail in light of this Beatitude? Well, in part, the answer is this. The church prevails because persecution arises from and therefore leads to faithful disobedience. The church in part prevails because persecution arises from and leads to faithful disobedience.

Now we're talking about faithful disobedience, of course. The faithfulness is toward God. The disobedience is to the powers that be, the way of the Lord. The way of the world, the governments of the world.

And the reason I choose this phrase is because of the writings of Wang Yi, who I've mentioned in years past. He's a pastor from Chengdu that's currently a little over halfway through a nine-year prison sentence for subversion of the state, for meeting and gathering to worship God, to proclaim the truth.

And of course, some of his writings, some of his open letters, some of his circular letters to the churches, some of the letters to the government, these things have been collected. And the book collecting these, as well as other Chinese underground church house leaders, are put together in this book called Faithful Disobedience.

And I think his understanding is such a helpful distillation of exactly what is in view here in the Eighth Beatitude. Persecution that arises from but also leads to faithful disobedience. And let's be very clear.

This does not mean picking a fight. This does not mean picking a fight. How could we get from the Seventh Beatitude to the Eighth Beatitude and miss that? Blessed are the peacemakers. And then the peacemakers are the ones that are persecuted.

Not the provocateurs. Not the porcupines. Not those that are basically going out to sort of create a fuss. These are not the peacemakers that are persecuted. These are not the ones that are blessed. And yet, I count Paul a peacemaker.

And what was he called in Acts? A disturber of the peace. As you'll see in a moment, Wang Yi is a peacemaker, par excellence. And he's in prison because he's disturbing the peace, the peace of the regime, you see?

So we don't go picking a fight, but when the fight comes, we stand. We put on the armor of God, and having done all, we stand. James says that the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace.

They're trying to sow it in peace. They're trying to make peace. And yet, because of the fruit of their righteousness, they're being persecuted. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake.

And so you begin here. As we talk about this, we begin here. Titus 3, and I'm gonna connect dots to this. So listen carefully. Titus 3, we see the same thing in 1 Timothy 2. I'll read that later. Titus 3, remind them, this is Paul, remind them, be subject to rulers and authorities, to obey, to be ready for every good work, to speak evil of no one, to be peaceable, gentle, showing all humility to all men.

We ourselves were also once foolish, disobedient, deceiving, serving various lusts and pleasures, living in malice, envious, hateful, hating one another. Now, notice what I'm saying. Persecution arises from and leads to faithful disobedience.

But where do you begin? You don't begin there. No, here's where you begin. Be subject, obey. Be ready for every good work and speak evil of no one. Be peaceable, be humble. That's where you begin. But if you've begun there, what will arise is persecution.

And that will lead you to faithful disobedience. You see, that's the logic. So Wang Yi describes or defines faithful disobedience as this. First, peaceful. Peaceful. Peaceful, meek, actively forbearing, joyful, and inevitable for the progress of the gospel.

Let me say that again. What is faithful disobedience? Well, you begin with Titus 3. You seek to be peaceable and gentle, showing humility to all men. You seek to be in subjection where you can with a clean conscience before God.

Be in subjection. You begin there. And where does faithful disobedience begin in light of that? Well, it begins as peaceful, meek, active, forbearance, joyful, and a pursuit of the advance of the gospel.

It's vital that we understand this. It's vital that we understand this. There are some who see the gospel as a means to retaining or preserving comfort, freedom, some sort of worldly peace. You're not understanding what's being said.

There's some who say, well, if we can sow the gospel, then we can preserve our freedoms and we can have more peace and stability. That's not what's being said. Faithful disobedience is peaceful. Why? Faithful disobedience is humble, is forbearing.