Monthly Archives: August 2023

What is the meaning of the word “Blessed” in Matthew 5:6?

Blessed is another word for happy, pleasant, or fortunate. Everyone is looking for happiness, a pleasant life, or good fortune. They pursue all kinds of things they think will make them happy, but they fail. It is like eating your favorite meal. You enjoy it and say, “I’m full. The yolk of an egg will burst me.!” However, in a few hours, however, you are in the pantry or fridge looking for something to eat, again.

Taking a closer look at the word “blessed”, I see other synonyms than happy like lauded, sanctified, consecrated, and holy. Substituting a few of these in the text, it would read like this: “Sanctified, consecrated, holy and lauded are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness for they will be filled.” Could it be this latter meaning that Jesus was getting at in the fourth Beatitude? A desire for all of us to be consecrated and sanctified?

What does it mean to “hunger and thirst after righteousness”?

If we must become holy, sanctified, and consecrated, Jesus says we must “hunger and thirst after righteousness….” Hunger is a sensation that stimulates a desire for food. Some people say they were born to eat because they are always hungry. I am not one of those people. Others were born hangry, but that’s a story for another time/blog!

Thirst, on the other hand, is a craving or desire to drink fluids. Everyone experiences hunger and thirst which must be satisfied because you can’t live without food and fluids.

“Righteousness” means right doing or uprightness. Jesus says, we must hunger and thirst after it. Yet, Romans 3:10 says, “There is none righteous, no, not one.” What a conundrum! Or is it? No, it isn’t. You see, righteousness is an attribute of God which comes from Jesus that is both positional and practical.

While all have sinned, and there is none that’s righteous, believers have positional (imputed) righteousness because we are in Christ, our Saviour and He is in us. Romans 5:19 says. “… For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one many will be made righteous”. Because of Christ’s death, our legal standing changes from unrighteous to righteous and our names are written in heaven with the tag, “Price Paid in full.”.

Positional righteousness must also be accompanied by practical or behavioural righteousness. The latter is righteousness in our nature and it is imparted to us as we are sanctified through the power of the Holy Spirit who dwells in us.  This sanctification happens over the course of our lives, and becomes evident in moral uprightness and the fruit of the Spirit.

Thus, when Jesus said, we must “hunger and thirst after righteousness”, He is saying we must develop an appetite, a craving and desire, for righteousness which He will give us, positionally and practically. In other words, just as God has built within us a continuous desire for food and fluids to support physical life and health, we must cultivate a craving for Jesus, our righteousness who foster our spiritual life and health.

The Filling 

What happens when we hunger and thirst after righteousness? Jesus says, “…we will be filled.” Filling, in this context, speaks to satiety or satisfaction and indicates there is emptiness or a void that must be addressed. Notice, however, that Jesus does not say with what we will be filled, nor from what source we will be filled.

That said, we know that God loves to fill the empty. With Jesus’ first miracle, He turned water to wine by asking the guests to fill six empty water pots. The woman at the well came to Jesus with her life empty and He filled it by offering her living water. The multitudes were starving, and the disciples wanted to send them away, but Jesus fed them until they were filled, and they had leftovers!

From the foregoing, we can conclude that righteousness is activated first by a desire to know Jesus personally. Secondly, “The same Spirit that filled the Temple lives inside of you (1 Corinthians 6:19). This shows that the Holy Spirit is the One who fills us with the power and the enabling to live righteously in this world.

God has provided all that we need to satisfy our hunger and quench our thirst for righteousness. So, how can you be righteous? Believe on the Lord Jesus. How can you be filled? “Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you” (Matthew 6:33). For what are you hungry and thirsty? God wants to fill our lives with what is best. That’s Jesus.

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