Renfrew Baptist Church Vancouver British Columbia Scripture of the Month

The simplest way, perhaps, to approach the text is just to look at its terms. It is one of those texts that divides itself for us, and all we have to do is to look at the meaning of the various terms which are used. Obviously therefore the one to start with is the term 'righteousness'. 'Blessed--or happy-are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness.' They are the only truly happy people. Now the whole world is seeking for happiness; there is no question about that. Everybody wants to be happy. That is the great motive behind every act and ambition, behind all work and all striving and effort. Everything is designed for happiness. But the great tragedy of the world is that, though it gives itself to seek for happiness, it never seems to be able to find it. The present state of the world reminds us of that very forcibly. What is the matter? I think the answer is that we have never understood this text as we should have done. 'Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness.' What does it mean? Let me put it negatively like this. We are not to hunger and thirst after blessedness; we are not to hunger and thirst after happiness. But that is what most people are doing. We put happiness and blessedness as the one thing that we desire, and thus we always miss it; it always eludes us. According to the Scriptures happiness is never something that should be sought directly; it is always something that results from seeking something else.

Now this is true of those outside the Church and of many inside the Church as well. It is obviously the tragedy of those who are outside the Church. The world is seeking for happiness. That is the meaning of its pleasure mania, that is the meaning of everything men and women do, not only in their work but still more in their pleasures. They are trying to find happiness; they are making it their goal, their one objective. But they do not find it because, whenever you put happiness before righteousness, you will be doomed to misery. That is the great message of the Bible from beginning to end. They alone are truly happy who are seeking to be righteous. Put happiness in the place of righteousness and you will never get it.

The world, it is obvious, has fallen into this primary and fundamental error, an error which one could illustrate in many different ways. Think of a man who is suffering from some painful disease. Generally the one desire of such a patient is to be relieved of his pain, and one can understand that very well. No-one likes suffering pain. The one idea of this patient, therefore, is to do anything which will relieve him of it. Yes; but if the doctor who is attending this patient is also only concerned about relieving this man's pain he is a very bad doctor. His primary duty is to discover the cause of the pain and to treat that. Pain is a wonderful symptom which is provided by nature to call attention disease, and the ultimate treatment for pain is to treat the disease, not the pain.. So if a doctor merely treats the pain without discovering the cause of the pain, he is not only acting contrary to nature, he is doing something that is extremely dangerous to the life of the patient. The patient may be out of pain, and seems to be well; but the cause of the trouble is still there. Now that is the folly of which the world is guilty. It says, 'I want to get rid of my pain, so I will run to the pictures, or drink, or do anything to help me forget my pain.' But the question is, what is the cause of the pain and the unhappiness and the wretchedness? They are not happy who hunger and thirst after happiness and blessedness. No. 'Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.'

This is equally true, however, of many within the Church. There are large numbers of people in the Christian Church who seem to spend the whole of their life seeking something which they can never find, seeking for some kind of happiness and blessedness. They go round from meeting to meeting, and convention to convention, always hoping they are going to get this wonderful thing, this experience that is going to fill them with joy, and flood them with some ecstasy. They see that other people have had it, but they themselves do not seem to get it. So they seek it and covet it, always hungering and thirsting; but they never get it.

Now that is not surprising. We are not meant to hunger and thirst after experiences; we are not meant to hunger and thirst after blessedness. If we want to be truly happy and blessed, we must hunger and thirst after righteousness. We must not put blessedness or happiness or experience in the first place. No, that is something that God gives to those who seek righteousness. Oh, the tragedy that we do not follow the simple teaching and instruction of the Word of God, but are always coveting and seeking this experience which we hope we are going to have. The experiences are the gift of God; what you and I are to covet and to seek and to hunger and thirst for is righteousness. Very well, that is a very important negative. But there are others.

What does this righteousness mean? 'It does not mean, of course, what is talked about so much at the present time, a sort of general righteousness or morality between nations. There is a great deal of talk about the sanctity of international contracts, and the honouring of bonds, and keeping your word, and straight dealing and fair play and all the rest of it. Well, it is not for me to denounce all that. It is all right as far as it goes; that is the kind of morality that was taught by the Greek pagan philosophers and it is very good. But the Christian gospel does not stop at that; its righteousness is not that at all. There are men who can talk eloquently about that kind of righteousness who know very little, it seems to me, about personal righteousness. Men can wax eloquent about how countries threaten the peace of the world and break their contracts, who at the same time are disloyal to their wives and disloyal to their own marriage contracts and the solemn vows they have taken. The gospel is not interested in that kind of talk; its conception of righteousness is much deeper than that. Neither does righteousness mean merely a general respectability or a general morality. I cannot stop with these various points; I merely mention them in passing.

Much more important and much more serious from the truly Christian standpoint is, I think, the fact that it is not right to define righteousness in this connection even as justification. There are those who turn up their Concordance and look at this word 'righteous-ness' (and of course you will find it in many places) and say it stands for justification. The apostle Paul uses it like that in the Epistle to the Romans, where he writes about 'the righteousness of God which is by faith'. There, he is talking about justification, and in such case, the context will generally make it perfectly plain to us. Very often it does mean justification; but here, I suggest, it means more. The very context in which we find it (and especially its relation to the three Beatitudes that have gone before) insists, it seems to me, that righteousness here includes not only justification but sanctification also. In other words, the desire for righteousness, the act of hungering and thirsting for it, means ultimately the desire to be free from sin in all its forms and in its every manifestation.

Let me divide that a little. It means a desire to be free from sin, because sin separates us from God. Therefore, positively, it means a desire to be right with God; and that, after all, is the fundamental thing. All the trouble in the world today is due to the fact that man is not right with God, for it is because he is not right with God that he has gone wrong everywhere else. That is the teaching of the Bible everywhere. So the desire for righteousness is a desire to be right with God, a desire to get rid of sin, because sin is that which comes between us and God, keeping us from knowledge of God, and all that is possible to us and for us with God and from God. So I must put that first. The man who hungers and thirsts after righteousness is the man who sees that sin and rebellion have separated him from the face of God, and longs to get back into that old relationship, the original relationship of righteousness in the presence of God. Our first parents were made righteous in the presence of God? They dwelt and walked with Him. That is the relationship such a man desires.

But it also means of necessity a desire to be free from the power of sin. Having realized what it means to be poor in spirit and to mourn because of sin within, we naturally come to the stage of longing to be free from the power of sin. The man we have been looking at in terms of these Beatitudes is a man who has come to see that the world in which he lives is controlled by sin and Satan; he sees that he is under the control of a malign influence, he has been walking 'according to-the prince of the power of the air , the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience'. He sees that 'the god of this world' has been blinding him to various things, and now he longs to be free from it. He wants to get away from this power that drags him down in spite of himself, that 'law in his members' of which Paul speaks in Romans vii. He wants to be free from the power and the tyranny and the thraldom of sin. You see how much further and how much deeper it goes than vague general talk, of a relationship between nation and nation, and things of that kind.

But it goes further still. It means a desire to be free from the very desire for sin, because we find that the man who truly examines himself in the light of the Scriptures not only discovers that he is in the bondage of sin; still more horrible is the fact that he likes it, that he wants it. Even after he has seen it is wrong, he still wants it. But now the man who hungers and thirsts after righteousness is a man who wants to get rid of that desire for sin, not only outside, but inside as well. In other words, he longs for deliverance from what you may call the pollution of sin: Sin is something that pollutes the very essence of our being and of our nature. The Christian is one who desires to be free from all that.

Perhaps we can sum it all up like this: to hunger and thirst after righteousness is to desire to be free from self in all its horrible manifestations, in all its forms. When we considered the man who is meek, we saw that all that really means is that he is free from self in its every shape and form-self-concern, pride, boasting, self-protection, sensitiveness, always imagining people are against him, a desire to protect self and glorify self. That is what leads to quarrels between individuals, that is what leads to quarrels between nations; self-assertion. Now the man who hungers and thirsts after righteousness is a man who longs to be free from all that; he wants to be emancipated from self-concern in every shape and form.

Until now I have been putting it rather negatively; but let me put it positively like this. To hunger and thirst after righteousness is nothing but the longing to be positively holy. I cannot think of a better way of defining it. The man who hungers and thirsts after righteousness is the man who wants to exemplify the Beatitudes in his daily life. He is a man who wants to show the fruit of the Spirit in his every action and in the whole of his life and activity. To hunger and thirst after righteousness is to long to be like the New Testament man, the new man in Christ Jesus. That is what it means, that the whole of my being and the whole of my life shall be like that. Let me go further. It means that one's supreme desire in life is to know God and to be in fellowship with Him, to walk with God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit in the light. 'Our fellowship', says John, 'is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ.' He also says, 'God is light, and in him is no darkness at all'. To be in fellowship with God means to be walking with God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the light, in that blessed purity and holiness. The man who hungers and thirsts after righteousness is the man who longs for that above everything else. And in the end that is nothing but a longing and desire to be like the Lord Jesus Christ Himself. Look at Him; look at His portrait in these Gospels; look at Him when He was here on earth in His incarnate state; look at Him in His positive obedience to God's holy law; look at Him in His reaction to other people, His kindness, His compassion, His sensitive nature; look at Him in His reaction to His enemies and all that they did to Him. There is the portrait, and you and I, according to the New Testament doctrine, have been born again and have been fashioned anew after that pattern and image. The man, therefore, who hungers and thirsts after righteousness, is the man who wants to be like that. His supreme desire is to be like Christ.

Very well, if that is righteousness, let us look at the other term, 'Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness.' Now this is most important because it brings us to the practical aspect of this matter. What does it mean to 'hunger and thirst'? Obviously it does not mean that we feel we can attain unto this righteousness by our own efforts and endeavour. That is the worldly view of righteousness which concentrates on man himself and leads to the individual pride of the Pharisee, or to the pride of one nation as against other nations regarding itself as being better and superior. It leads to those things which the apostle Paul lists in Philippians iii and which he there dismisses as 'dung', all self-confidence, all belief in self. 'To hunger and thirst' cannot mean that, because the first Beatitude tells us that we must be 'poor in spirit' which is a negation of every form of self-reliance.

Well, what does it mean? It obviously means some simple things like these. It means a consciousness of our need, of our deep need. I go further, it means a consciousness of our desperate need; it means a deep consciousness of our great need even to the point of pain. It means something that keeps on until it is satisfied. It does not mean just a passing feeling, a passing desire. You remember how Hosea says to the nation of Israel that she is always, as it were, coming forward to the penitent form and then going back to sin. Her righteousness, he says, is as 'a morning cloud'-it is here one minute and gone the next. The right way he indicates in the words-'then shall we know, if we follow on to know the Lord.' 'Hunger' and 'thirst' ; these are not passing feelings. Hunger is something deep and profound that goes on until it is satisfied. It hurts, it is painful; it is like actual, physical hunger and thirst. It is something that goes on increasing and makes one feel desperate. It is something that causes suffering and agony.

Let me suggest another comparison. To hunger and thirst is to be like a man who wants a position. He is restless, he cannot keep still; he is working and plodding; he thinks about it, and dreams about it; his ambition is the controlling passion of his life. To 'hunger and thirst' is like that; the man 'hungers and thirsts' after that position. Or it is like a longing for a person. There is always a great hunger and thirst in love. The chief desire of the one who loves is to be with the object of his love. If they are separated he is not at rest until they are together again. 'Hungering and thirsting'. I need not use these illustrations. The Psalmist has summed it up perfectly in a classical phrase: ' As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, a God. My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God.' He is hungering and thirsting after Him-that is it. Let me quote some words of the great .N. Darby which I think put this exceedingly well. He says, 'To be hungry is not enough; I must be really starving to know what is in His heart towards me.' Then comes the perfect statement of the whole thing. He says, 'When the prodigal son was hungry he went to feed upon husks, but when he was starving, he turned to his father.' Now that is the whole position. To hunger and thirst really means to be desperate, to be starving, to feel life is ebbing out, to realize my urgent need of help. 'Hungering and thirsting after righteousness'-'as the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth-so thirsteth- my soul after thee, O God.'

Lastly, let us look briefly at what is promised to the people who are like that. It is one of the most gracious, glorious statements to be found in the entire Bible. 'Happy, happy', 'blessed', 'to be congratulated' are those who thus hunger and thirst after righteousness. Why? Well, 'they shall be filled', they shall be given what they desire. The whole gospel is there. That is where the gospel of grace comes in; it is entirely the gift of God. You will never fill yourself with righteousness, you will never find blessedness apart from Him. To obtain this, 'all the fitness He requireth, is to see your need of Him', nothing more. When you and I know our need, this hunger and starvation, this death that is within us, then God will fill us, He will give us this blessed gift. 'Him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.' Now this is an absolute promise, so if you really are hungering and thirsting after righteousness you will be filled. There is no question about it. Make sure you are not hungering and thirsting after blessedness. Hunger and thirst after righteousness, long to be like Christ, and then you will have that and the blessedness.... Martin Lloyd-Jones

Monthly Scripture Verse Expounded

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

Matt 5:6 NIV