Sermon on the Mount (Part 3)

The Final Beatitude and the Call to Rejoice Under Persecution

I'm Matthew chapter 5, and we'll begin with the final beatitude there in verse 10. "'Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for my sake.

Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven. For so they persecuted the prophets who were before you. You are the salt of the earth, but if the salt loses its flavor, how shall it be seasoned?

It is then good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men. You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden, nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house.

Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.'". Now, we have talked about the beatitudes together as a group looking at that designation of blessed, that we are not only the saints and the children of God, but we are also the beatified.

That is not a special title given to certain Roman Catholic celebrities on their way to sainthood. The beatified describes all who are in Christ. This is our kingdom-issued standard ID card. We are the blessed ones.

We are blessed. And Jesus is describing here in the first section of the Sermon on the Mount who belongs to His kingdom so that everybody will know to whom He is giving His instructions. Who may claim these promises?

Who should have these expectations? Well, He has identified who belongs to His kingdom as a king who He rules over. We come to the last beatitude, and we see that it is emphasized by two following verses that just flesh out the whole idea of what He says in verse 10.

We're going to think about that a little bit, and then think about the connection that that has with the public testimony of the saints. They're in verses 13 through 16. I forget who it was who commented on this particular section that you move from the promise of persecution yet being blessed into maintaining a public witness, and how that's so logical that Jesus would put those two together, for the instinct would be to reduce the public witness, reduce the visibility of the church to avoid the persecution.

The old Chinese proverb is, the nail that sticks out gets hammered, and so the idea is like, I don't want to stick out, I don't want to have sharp edges, I want to try to blend in so that I won't be persecuted.

So, these two things come together, it's like, no, no, no, you're blessed if you're persecuted for righteousness sake, for the sake of Jesus, and here's how you stand out, as salt and as light. Now, this is the last beatitude, and this clarifies that this list of beatitudes is no sales job.

This is a culminating consideration that is fitting. If we didn't have this last beatitude, I wonder how the others would read on their own. There'd be a massive incompleteness here. We would have the sense that somehow that everything has to be going right for us to truly be blessed, but here we are as the blessed ones who are being persecuted.

This is an expanded beatitude. This is given to us in three verses rather than one. The Lord is driving home His point. He's allowing no misunderstanding of His application, no misalignment of what He means.

This is an imperative beatitude. This is the first time we have a command. We haven't had any commands at all yet in the Sermon on the Mount, but here's the first.

One.

And what is the command there in verse 12? Rejoice and be exceedingly glad. First time we have a command in the Sermon on the Mount. And then we have this beatitude as a direct beatitude. Notice in verses 11 and 12, we transition from the third person plural all through the beatitudes, theirs and those and they, to a very personal direct use of you and your, or y 'all if you prefer.

But there's a pointing at the disciples and the multitudes now in a way that's more direct than previously. So what is the principle to be learned here? It's a challenging principle to be sure to think about what Jesus is saying.

It's hard to grasp and to believe. Beatified are the battered, happy are the hunted. Hard to believe. It's like, well, I don't know, it seems to not really fit together. But notice the clarifying clause, for righteousness' sake, blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake.

And then we're given the substantive reason, the sweeping reason for this state of blessedness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. So when we start off with this expression of blessed, we've already been talking about.

That.

Last week, we spent a long time thinking about what does it mean to be the blessed ones. And we recognize that the state of this happiness is in Christ, not in our circumstances. But nonetheless, some of our circumstances are directly related to Christ and how we interpret them and how we understand them.

And so indeed, we can adopt this title of happy and blessed, especially favored. And this beatitude, this last beatitude you see, stands in parallel with the first. Both of them end the same way, and this should catch our attention.

Verse 3 says, blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. So blessed are the spiritually impoverished in the sense of, blessed are the humble. Blessed are those who are lowly.

Blessed are those who have the essential ingredients of repentance and godly sorrow as they enter into the kingdom. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. So you have that in verse 3.

And then verse 10, blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. These are the only two beatitudes that end the same way. And you can see that they denote the beginning and the end of the eight beatitudes.

And you'll notice that the boundary Jesus draws is belonging to the kingdom. He's explaining who's in. He's drawing the boundaries of His kingdom, and He's doing so very intentionally. Think about this.

Entry into Christ's kingdom is not by fraud. You don't get in by a violation. You only come in if you're the poor in spirit. He set a child before them and said, of such is the kingdom of heaven. The humble, the lowly, those who don't come offering their own merit, but pleading only their need.

They come lowly. They come humble. So there's no way into the kingdom by fraud. Also notice there's no success against the kingdom by force. That's the last beatitude. Most kingdoms, how are they undermined?

Well, you can have all manner of violations against the kingdom, all manner of people coming into the kingdom, undercutting the kingdom that way, or you can have violent attacks against the kingdom. Maybe the kingdom will fall by external force.

One way or the other, these are two ways classically throughout history that kingdoms fall. But notice Christ's kingdom is not subject to those same assaults. Can't get in by fraud, and you can't succeed against it by force.

Attack those who belong to the kingdom, and they're just blessed. So, this is obviously a different type of kingdom, and indeed, He calls it the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who are persecuted.

So what is the meaning of persecution? It means to make someone run or to cause someone to flee, to put to flight, to drive away. This is what you do to a stray dog too close to your home and children.

Clap your hands, you yell loudly, charge a few steps, and what does the dog do? He turns around and runs, checks, you do it again, he's gone. Putting someone to flight, that's what Saul of Tarsus did.

He was putting Christians to flight, and they fled, and they left Jerusalem in droves, using hostility and violence to scatter the saints. Now, of course, they tried to treat Christ that way, they tried to treat His followers that way.

Blessed are the persecuted. Now, notice it's for righteousness' sake. Christ's people are blessed even when they are persecuted on account of their commitment to righteousness, because of their apparent righteousness, due to their uniform that they're.

Wearing.

Notice the first seven Beatitudes describe what Christians appear like in the world. Our family resemblance, we belong to a family, and it's not that we have all the same type of ear shape and eye color.

All right? Our similarities look like the traits, the eight different traits there in the Beatitudes. Well, the first seven are different ways of describing righteousness, describing what it looks like in real life.

And so, because that's the uniform that the saints wear, they can be identified, targeted, and persecuted. The coat of many colors makes many brothers jealous. Wearing the favor of God makes others jealous, especially in this context between the old covenant stewards who are envious of Christ and His people who are being favored by God.

Now, when we think about righteousness, we recognize in verse 6, this is something to be hungered after and thirsted for. Here, righteousness is something that is targeted. In verse 20, we're going to see that righteousness is a standard for entry into the kingdom.

So, we're going to talk about what that means. But what is righteousness in general? Righteousness may be thought of as an essential correspondence to that which is right. It is the trait of rightness.

God Himself is the standard, as well as the standard bearer, and He is the standard setter, which is why original righteousness was described as being made in God's image, right? So He is the standard, the standard bearer, and the standard setter, so if we're made in His image, we're made according to His standard, that means that we are right.

Well, Adam and Eve were right from the very beginning. They were very good, good and very good. So there was our original righteousness. Any movement from unrighteousness to righteousness, therefore, is movement towards the fullness of the image of God, a renewal of what we would call godliness.

The more the image of God is clear, the more godly the person is. That's how those ideas come together. So it is our inherent design for conformity and reflection made in God's image that communicates righteousness.

My favorite YouTube contractor, Essential Craftsman, I should call him Grandpa, he always is talking about having everything plumb, level, and true. And you can really tell, especially when the inspector comes along and gets out his level and his ruler and his plumb line, when it's not plumb, level, and true.

And sometimes you can just tell it from the outside. Sometimes you walk by a house and say, that ain't right. That's just not right. Look at that. That's going to fall over. You can just tell. Christ's righteousness is perfect.

He is the image of the invisible God. That's what the Scriptures testify of Jesus. So He is the perfect manifestation of the righteousness of God, and He is the image of the invisible God. He is our standard.

He is our standard bearer. He is our standard setter as the king of the kingdom, which is why you'll see in the text that after Jesus says, you know, blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, He gets real personal and says, blessed are you when you are persecuted for my sake.

Do you see how He puts righteousness and His own person in parallel? He's telling us where we're to look to understand righteousness. Now, we are forever saved by Christ's righteousness, and His salvation brings about righteousness in our lives.

Our experiential pursuit and growth in righteousness is according to Christ, and we should think of that relationship very briefly. The righteousness that we pursue and grow in is not the basis of our relationship with.

God.

It is the fruit of our relationship with God. The way that we are being shaped by righteousness, it will show up. He will continue the good work that He has begun in us. But the way we're being shaped by the righteousness of God is the way that an island is shaped by an ocean.

The ocean comes again and again with the various tides and storms, and the island is shaped again and again by all of that ocean. So also, every wave of sanctification that breaks upon the shore of our lives comes in from the ocean of justification.

We are situated there in the righteousness of Christ. We're situated there, and then we are affected by the righteousness of Christ in that way. But our situation, our placement, our status is according to the righteousness of Christ, and we can't help but be affected.

Now, the interesting question is, why would anyone persecute righteousness? They see righteousness somewhere. They see something good, true, and beautiful, and they say, oh, that's got to go. Why would there be a persecution of godliness, that which accords with the image of God?

Why would there be a targeting of righteousness? What is most human? What is best human? Well, where the glory of God shines brightest, there the opposition of darkness will be most fierce. Notice, everything diabolical is consistently anti-human, absolutely against it.

Anything that is looking for the destruction of human life, the disruption of human life, the doing away with human life, be sure to find the diabolical behind it. Notice the present tense promise of theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Now, this is why those who are persecuted are so blessed. It's not that we own the kingdom of heaven, but it belongs to us. It belongs to the saints, as we belong to it, we have a full stake in the kingdom of.

Heaven.

Now, what is the kingdom of heaven? That question is answered by Christ throughout the gospel of Matthew in an abundance of ways. Not something that can be answered very quickly, for Jesus spends chapters talking about it.

The kingdom of heaven is like, the kingdom of heaven is like, how often do we hear Him explaining and describing the kingdom of heaven for the benefit of His hearers? But when you think about a kingdom, let's be very simple.

A kingdom necessarily has a king, and we already know who that is. Chapters 1 through 4 talk to us about who the king is. So to possess the kingdom of heaven is to have heaven's man as our king. To belong to the kingdom of heaven is to have Jesus Christ as king.

And we see that this kingdom is a present tense possession, theirs is the kingdom of heaven, and yet there's all manner of future certainties. They shall be filled, they shall be comforted, right? They shall see God.

So there's all these future tense ahead of us, even though it's a present tense reality. And we get the significance of this kingdom being of heaven rather than being of the earth. Now, this contrast has been made already back in the original location where Jesus and the apostles get the language of kingdom of heaven and kingdom of God, and get it from Daniel.

In Daniel 2 .44, it says, in the days of these kings, in the days of these kings, this kingdom will be established. And what kings were those? Well, the vision shows the rock that is Christ uncut by human hands coming down from heaven and smashing into the age of the emperors in the fourth empire of Rome.

Very clearly, this is when the kingdom shows up, the apostles knew it. And this kingdom is not like the other kingdoms. The other kingdoms were in the shape of a man, right? The head, the shoulders and arms, the waist and the legs, four different precious metals, all in the shape of a man.

And what was it described? Standing on the earth. These are all kingdoms of the earth. But the kingdom that comes from heaven is not like those kingdoms. It is uncut by human hands, whereas the idol is very much shaped in human hands.

What a contrast. And so, the kingdom of heaven comes in and crashes into this statue of men, undoes all of these kingdoms, and then grows to become a mountain that fills the entirety of the.

Earth.

And so, for the more literal-minded of us, now we're thinking of an ice cream cone upside.

Down.

It's a mountain on top of the earth, it fills the entire... No, it is a power and an authority, a dominion that fills the earth, which is why today we have all manner of fellow kingdom subjects in all different tribes, tongues, and nations.

His mountain, His kingdom is filling up the earth. And so, preaching the gospel of the kingdom accords with that, as Jesus tells different parables and examples and shows how His kingdom spreads and how it's different and superior to the kingdoms of men.

Now, verse 11 tells us the person to be loved, and that, of course, is Christ. "'Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for My sake.'". Very clearly, this comes from thinking about a system to a Savior.

Both are true, but our focus should be upon the Savior. It's for His sake, putting our attention there. He's the one that we love, and when we rightly order our affections, it's for the sake of Jesus that we would be blessed if we are persecuted.

We will be reviled. That means they will lie about us in mean ways. To put it as simply as you can, they're going to say nasty things about us that are not true as a standard way of talking. This has happened again and again in the book of Acts, as we see Paul going and preaching the gospel in a variety of places.

How often does he get reviled? How often is Christ blasphemed? And Jesus says, no, you are blessed. When they say all kinds of evil against you falsely for My sake. Notice the expression falsely. We get no brownie points for them saying things about us for what we actually did that was wrong, right?

And how often do we have that? Especially, how often is there a scandal in evangelicalism, and it comes out that so-and-so who's been saying such-and-such didn't live according to his own standards.

And then there's a big blow-up and everybody sees it and how awful that is. But when they say all kinds of evil against us falsely for Christ's sake, for His sake. Verse 12, this is the pattern to be lived.

Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you. Here's the command. He's saying, fist pump and jump up and down in celebration.

Congratulations, you get an A. Be happy about this and truly rejoice about this because they persecuted the prophets before you. This is the same they you'll notice in verse 11 who reviled. He says, when they revile you, when they say evil things about you, and you start hunting around for the antecedent for this pronoun.

It's like, well, who's the they?

All of a sudden, it's they. They are doing this and they are doing, well, who are they? And you're not going to find a really great candidate for the they in this passage other than this, that they are the same that persecuted the prophets who were before you.

That's as specific as he gets, and who was it who persecuted the prophets who were before the saints? It wasn't the Romans. The Romans didn't even know about the prophets.

Who was it?

Yeah.

And so, there were the unfaithful, prideful, idolatrous leaders in the Jewish nation who were not faithful. There were other faithful ones who were grieved by sin and tried to do the right thing, and of course, the prophets themselves that proclaimed God's Word appropriately.

But then there were many others who were idolatrous in a variety of ways, and they are the ones who persecuted the prophets. They didn't like Isaiah. They didn't like Jeremiah. They didn't like Ezekiel.

They didn't like all the prophets, and they targeted them and persecuted them. How often are the stories of Elijah and Elisha about them being persecuted, right? So Jesus is identifying where the strongest resistance is going to be for His audience, and this makes a whole lot of sense because He's describing who are the real people of.

God.

They're the blessed ones who are in the kingdom, and that doesn't sit well with those who think that they're blessed of God simply by being born. There's a whole lot of Jews who have, in Jesus' day, who have this ethnic pride, and they're going to be very upset with Jesus saying these types of things and very angry at those who are of the way, and they're going to persecute them.

He said, but they did that to the prophets before you. And, of course, Jesus goes into greater detail about that in Matthew chapter 23, right before He pronounces judgment upon Jerusalem. Now, Jesus says, rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven.

You're going to be rewarded for this suffering. It's not going to be meaningless. Very often we get the idea that if we try to do the right thing and say the right thing and people respond poorly, well, that was pointless.

Oh, no, no, no.

Not according to heaven.

It's not.

It's not pointless according to heaven. There is reward. There is joy. There is something good out of that. And they persecuted the prophets who were before you. This is long in tradition, the scribes and the Pharisees.

It is significant that the righteousness which they persecute stands in agreement with the prophets. Think about that. The prophets declared the meaning and direction of the Old Covenant. They declared the need for the people's repentance and faith in God's promises.

They called all the people to fear God, forsake their idolatry, forsake their immorality, forsake their injustices, and that Jesus Christ and His people would be persecuted as the prophets were indicates that Jesus Christ in His kingdom is the meaning and the direction of the covenants that the prophets preached from the very beginning.

So who is in the real line of meaning of the Old Testament? Who is bringing forward the true meaning of the scriptures? Who really has the right idea about what all of this means in the Bible? Well, it's Christ and all His followers.

They're the ones who are truly carrying forward the faith that was proclaimed for thousands of years. When we look at the followers of the way, the Christians versus the temple loyalists or the law loyalists, and ask which one stands in the proper progression of the scriptures, which group is the main group, which group is the breakaway group, what would the saints.

Say?

Well, they say it in 1 John 2, they left us. They say antichrist, the spirit of antichrist is very clear. They left us, denying that Jesus is the Christ. Romans don't know who Jesus is or what the big deal about the Messiah is at all.

The ones who denied that Jesus was the Christ and that the Son of God came in the flesh, which John identifies as antichrist in 1 John, are the Jews, the temple Jews, the law-abiding, the law-zealous Jews.

And so, they're the ones who actually left. They were the dissenters, something to keep in mind as Jesus teaches. Let's move on to the kingdom's publicity or their public testimony in verses 13 through 16.

We have these two expressions that are very classic and favored, salt and light. What they teach us in the main is that there is no possible way to make the Christian religion a private matter that has no impact on public life.

Any politician that says that their Christianity is a private matter doesn't have Christianity. Christianity at its heart is salt and light, or it's nothing at all. It's actually something that is transformative and overflows and touches everything, or it's nothing at all.

And this is the way Jesus tells it. First of all, we have salt. In verse 13, you are the salt of the earth, but if the salt loses its flavor, how shall it be seasoned? It is then good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men.

So, Jesus says, you are the salt of the earth. Now, what does that mean? Now, that is the expression that we have in our common tongue. When somebody says, oh, you're the salt of the earth, what do they mean by that?

They're not calling someone Lot's wife. That's a different thing. But when someone is described as the salt of the earth, what is normally meant by that? Well, yeah, but I mean, this is used about people, right?

Really good person, really good person. Somebody you want in your town, right? Somebody you want maybe on the city council of some small town somewhere. Someone that makes a really good neighbor, salt of the earth, right?

That's how it's been used, and it's a fairly accurate rendering of the idea. It's not as specific as it could be. But the salt of the earth is the metaphor that we have to understand. And notice that the follow-through on the next portion of verse 13 envisions an idea of what happens if salt becomes unsalty.

It's good for nothing, right? But I'll tell you what's good for everything, salt. Unsalty salt is good for nothing, but salty salt, well, that's good for everything, especially in the days of Jesus. Salt was so useful.

It was used for all kinds of things in the ancient world. Salt could aid in fertilization, or in abundance, it could be used to curse a land. Salt preserved and seasoned food. It was used in dyeing textiles and in tanning hides.

Salt was helpful in some forms of construction and in various types of food. It was used in the production process of medicine, thus it was used in trade. Sometimes soldiers were paid in salt for their wages.

Salt was used in covenant-making, in rituals, in sacrifices, and more than anything, when you read the Bible, salt is connected with the idea of purification, purification. It was used to sanctify sacrifices in Leviticus, used to purify babies, we read about in Ezekiel 16.

It was used to cleanse water in 2 Kings 2, and it was used in covenants to testify to the purity of the intentions of those who were agreeing with one another. And so normally we think of salt as a preservative, but why is it a preservative?

Because it purifies. So the root of the idea of salt being a preserving thing is the idea that it purifies. A lot of food was preserved by salt. I mean this is the way that they kept food for a long time, and in most of world history that's how meat was preserved, and a lot of different types of food was preserved was just by salt.

If we can imagine a world today without refrigeration, that's hard to do, can you imagine your world today without refrigeration? Imagine a world without salt. How much life goes away if salt goes away?

That's the construct that Jesus is building in the minds of His hearers. The normal interpretation of this verse is that without Christians, society rots quickly. Well, who can argue with that? The root of that is salt is about purification.

Christ's blessed people are the salt of the earth. It means that we have a direct meaningful impact in the world today.

Okay.

Salt isn't a preservative to be packed away with moisture absorbers, kind of put aside a little bit of rice there in the salt, keep it from clumping, and then put away for 50 year storage for the apocalypse when we can finally break it out, right?

Salt is an everyday thing. Salt is an everybody thing. It's to be out there and to be used. It's not to be tucked away and preserved for a grand exit. And whatever the meaning of salt of the earth, it's going to accord with the light of the.

World.

Now, you think about how everyday salt is, how much is everyday light, right? Light is an everyday thing. Look at useful salt is, how useful is light? How welcome is salt? How welcome is light? These are going together, and so we're thinking about the earth, we're thinking about the world, we're thinking about that scope of Christ's kingdom is going to be a whole lot bigger than the Levant, it's going to be a lot bigger than Palestine, it's going to be a lot bigger than Canaan, it's going to be a lot bigger than any kind of boundary territory in the old covenant.

We're talking about the earth. We're talking about the world. The Old Testament says the meek shall inherit the land. Jesus says the meek shall inherit the earth. He's thinking much bigger. He's thinking new covenant, not old covenant.

So when we think about the salt of the earth, we need to think about it's more than just a solid citizen, it's more than being a generous neighbor, it's more than virtue signaling, it's more than therapeutic compassion.

I do good things for people because it makes me feel good, right? It's about a world that is in need of purification, the earth under the reign of Christ. Remember that we are God's image being renewed in Christ, thus renewing His creation by His resurrection life.

We are blessed to be a blessing in all ways and in all directions. That's the whole idea of the Beatitudes being followed up by these metaphors of salt and light, blessed to be a blessing. The idea of salt losing its flavor, I mean, how does that do that?

A lot of people begin to get out their chemistry textbooks now and says, okay, how does sodium chloride break down? Actually, let's think about how they got salt in the land of Israel. Where would they find salt?

The Dead Sea. Boy, there was a lot of salt. And they would go grab water out of the Dead Sea, get all that white clumpy stuff out of the Dead Sea and put it out in the sun, let it evaporate, and it'd have this white dust.

And there was salt in there and a bunch of other stuff. But it was white powder and they would use it and the salt that was in the white powder would do its job. But what would happen if that got wet?

The first thing to dissolve would be the sodium chloride, and what was left was white dust that had no salt. And you'd be sprinkling white dust on stuff and, boy, that doesn't taste like what it's supposed to taste like.

And you put your white dust on the meat, but, boy, that meat rotted, didn't it? And all of a sudden, you have unsalty salt. Jesus is just making a common observation, you know, when your salt isn't salty, it's just useless, isn't it?

Good for nothing but road dust. Throw it out in the street. The street, by the way, was the big garbage bin in the ancient Near East. If you didn't like something, you just threw it out in the middle of the road and that's where it would go.

And if you had unsalty salt, just throw it out in the middle of the road.

What else is it good for?

Throw it in the trash. D .A. Carson put it like this, the purpose of salt is to fight deterioration and therefore it must not itself deteriorate. I would put it more fundamentally, salt is prized for purification.

So what happens if it becomes impure? What good is it? So the saints, the blessed ones, we are more than a moral disinfectant for society. There's a truth to that, but there's a whole lot more about it because it's not simply that we are retarding the progress of slime and corruption, it's that we are following a king and we're calling everyone else to follow that king and to submit to his authority and to go his direction.

Last metaphor is that of light. You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden, nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house.

Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven. Now, when he says, you are the light of the world, Jesus is speaking to His disciples, to the multitudes, everybody who would own Him as king, everybody who would be blessed to be a part of His kingdom, He's saying to them, you are the light of the world.

Now, that might be a little surprising because, I thought Jesus was the light of the world. And He says that He is the light of the world in the Gospel of John. He also is called the light of the world in Matthew chapter 4.

So, the king has already been identified as the light to the nations in Matthew chapter.

4.

Now, He's saying to His kingdom subjects, you are the light of the world. Well, how can that be? Because He's the one who set them on fire. He's the one who lit them up. He's the one who has blessed them to be a blessing.

So we are not furthering our agendas. We're not pushing forward our fame and our glory, but we're setting forth the fame and the glory and the goodness of Christ. It is in this way that we do our good works so that our Father in heaven is the one who is glorified rather than us.

I think it's funny how the Sunday school song has become a very pop secular song, this little light of mine, right? How is it sung, right? In the popular secular side, this little light of mine is all about, I'm going to showcase myself.

I'm going to put myself out there. I'm going to believe in myself and present myself as this bright light that everybody should look at and watch, right? And I'm not going to let anybody poof it out, right?

And the whole idea of the metaphor is lost. And so, when we look at the Scriptures, the light that we have is very particular. And we have to identify our light in Christ's light. Now, Isaiah 9 is the passage that is quoted in Matthew 4, that Jesus is the light of the.

Nations.

But also we have Isaiah 42, verse 6, I, the Lord, have called you in righteousness. This is God speaking to Messiah, as recorded by the prophet Isaiah. And I will hold your hand. I will keep you and give you as a covenant to the people, as a light to the Gentiles, a light to the nations.

So, the Lord says to my Lord, David says, right? Well, Isaiah got to listen in to. And God says to Messiah, I am going to give you as a covenant, you yourself, your person is going to be the covenant, right?

So Jesus Christ in His humanity is the ark of the covenant. He bears the covenant. He offers His blood and body as the new covenant. And this means that He is the light of the nations. He is the light of the world.