A Heart of Gold
Matthew 5:8
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”
As I have said many times in our posts, the Beatitudes are not a formula that must be enacted, but a description of the Christian’s character and a reminder of the reward that comes with following Jesus. This is a very helpful point to remember when we come to our Beatitude today. Certainly, when we look at the previous Beatitudes, we can mistakenly attribute some of these qualities to the non-Christian. For example, we can imagine someone who is a non-Christian desiring righteousness. Or we can imagine someone who is not a Christian being merciful towards others. These things do not seem outside the realm of possibility for us. However, when we come to this Beatitude it becomes extremely clear that we cannot attribute the character quality of “pure in heart” to anyone but the Christian. Here is what I mean by that.
1) No One Has a Pure Heart
Anyone who isn’t an absolute narcissist has to admit that they are not—and cannot be—pure in heart. Think for a moment about the darkest thoughts you’ve ever had. Think about the murderous intentions that flitted through your mind as someone cut you off on the highway. Think about the lustful desires that have intruded themselves upon you when you least expected it. Think about the greed that has welled up in your heart while you were budgeting for the next month. Think about the times when you have not only experienced these sorts of emotions but thoroughly enjoyed them. Need I say more?
The person who is truly “pure in heart” would never think in these ways. The pure in heart would never sin in these ways, but none of us can say that we haven’t had these types of experiences. The idea that we are sinful people, that we do sinful things, that our hearts are impure, and inclined towards evil is not a doctrine that needs to be accepted on faith. Our own experiences confirm these things to be true and it is obvious to anyone who is not deluding themselves with wishful thinking. There is no one, not a single person, who has a pure heart.
Yet, it isn’t just that we have impure hearts, it is also that we are utterly incapable of getting pure hearts on our own. Jeremiah 17:9 says, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it.” A while ago I got quite sick and in order for me to heal the doctor prescribed me some antibiotics. If I had not taken those antibiotics I would not have recovered from that sickness. Our hearts are sick, and they will not get better on their own. What they need is the healing balm of a physician. They need someone else’s work in order to heal. They will never heal on their own and move from impure to pure. So how do we get a pure heart?
2) Only Jesus Can Give a Pure Heart
Our hearts are sick and impure. We need healing not training. This is why in the Old Testament one of the promises of God towards his people is that he will give them new hearts. Because the heart is the root of humanities problems, and we desperately need a heart transplant. In Ezekiel we read, “And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh” (36:26). So who will do this work for us? The answer to that is Jesus.
In Jesus what we see is our being taken from impurity to purity. This is confirmed all throughout the New Testament. For example, in 1 Corinthians 6 Paul lists a bunch of sinful character qualities, but then he writes, “And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God” (6:11). What Paul is saying here is that through Jesus’s saving work we were forgiven (washed), set apart by God and given new desires (sanctified), and that we are seen as legally righteous (justified) before God.
Or, for instance, in 2 Corinthians 5 Paul writes, “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (5:21). In other words, Jesus bore our sin in himself on the cross—he was made sin—so that we might become righteous, or holy, in God’s sight.
Let’s look at one last example of this, Colossians 1:21-22. We read there that we were “alienated” from God. That we were “hostile in mind” towards him. And that we did “evil deeds”. These are the hallmarks of an impure heart. But then we read that through Jesus’s death we have been made “holy and blameless and above reproach before him” (1:22).
These are just a few examples of places in the New Testament where it speaks of Jesus as the one who takes us from being people of impure hearts to people of pure hearts in a legal sense. Even though we still are prone towards sin in this life when God looks upon us now, he declares us righteous, holy, blameless, and pure before him because of the work of Christ on our behalf. Thus, only in Jesus, do we get a “pure heart” before the Lord.
3) Only A Pure Heart Can See God
Finally, we must notice that one of the truisms of Scripture is that only the “pure in heart” can see God. God is presented to us in the Bible as an utterly holy being. He is completely morally pure and there is no spot or stain of sin in him. He is light, and sin is darkness. As soon as a light comes into a dark room the darkness is immediately destroyed, it’s done away with.
This is why in the Old Testament, a theme we see pop up a few times, is that God’s face, or his fullness, cannot be seen by people. Since human beings are sinful, impure, or full of darkness, if God who dwells in unapproachable light were to reveal all of his glory to them, then the result would be their destruction. We get a good example of this with Moses. In Exodus 33 Moses asks to see God. God responds to Moses request with these words, “You cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live” (33:20). If human beings were to see the full glory of God, because of our impurity, we would die.
While this is a scary thought, the reality here is that it is also a great comfort to us. If only the pure in heart can see God, and we have been made pure thanks to Jesus, then we are now able to see God. Where even Moses wasn’t able to see God in his glory, thanks to Jesus we have been made capable of beholding God which is one of the promises of Scripture. Paul in the letter of 1 Corinthians writes, “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face” (13:12). In other words, a day is coming when we will see God face to face.
Conclusion
Therefore, this beatitude, more than all those that precede it, demonstrates to us that Jesus here is talking about the Christian’s character. He is saying that the Christian, the one who trusts in him, is “pure in heart” and able now to see God. Going all the way back to our first post on the Beatitudes we can see here that true human flourishing looks like a pure heart, that this comes only through Jesus and thus describes the Christian, and the result of being a Christian is the visio dei, the vision of God.