Are You Blessed, Or Are You Trying To Be Blessed?

Have you heard the Beatitudes preached this way:“If you are poor in spirit enough, if you are sad enough, if you are hungering and thirsting enough, THEN, you will be blessed.”

The sermon sounds like a conditional reward.  If you are this, you get that.  But “this word [blessed] affirms a state of blessing that already exists. Each beatitude declares that a group of people usually regarded as afflicted is actually blessed.” (TOW, Bible Commentary) The word blessed is an adjectival noun, meaning that it serves as an indicative and a descriptive. The Bible describes a people who are called. They are “the” called indicating who they are; and they are the “called” noting the action being done to them.  So it is with the Blessed.  They are THE blessed indicating who they are by description and they are the blessed indicating what is happening to them.  Matthew uses the word ‘blessed’ in both ways.  

One might successfully argue that we cannot be Christians unless we are poor in spirit, or mourn over sin.  Jesus simply declares that those people are already blessed.  Non-Christians would think otherwise.  To the contrary Jesus is saying to us as citizens of His kingdom that you are blessed, despite the fact of being poor in spirit, persecuted, hungry — hungering for righteousness, etc. You are a blessed people, not a cursed people.  And then He adds to each of the eight a promise connected with that assertion.  To personalize the text one might say: “My meekness is not the condition of the cursed, it is the condition of the blessed.  Therefore the promise to us (Blessed is in the plural) that we all who are meek will inherit the earth.”  

Perhaps you will read the Beatitudes differently and “rejoice and be glad”.