Sermon Bible Commentary
Matthew 5:8
To see God that has been the deep desire of living souls through all time. Men of earnest spirits have ever felt, instinctively, that the highest blessedness of life must consist in the vision of God not in a vision of His glory, revealed to the perishing eye of the body, but that spiritual vision of Him which belongs to the soul that has fellowship with the Divine.
I. We begin by inquiring into the meaning of purity of heart; for it is only by understanding in what that purity consists that we shall see how the vision of God rises from it. There is no true purity apart from the absolute enthronement of God in the affections. It is not the absence of unholy affections, it is the presence of a holy and surpassingly earnest love, that makes us really pure. The soul is so supremely an altar that it must worship something in its inmost shrine, and unless it worship God there it cannot be pure. His presence there, and it alone, can rob temptation of its charm, dispel all carnal longings, throw back the fierce onset of ancient and besetting sins, and make the heart utterly holy.
II. Purity of heart gives the vision of God. In proceeding to illustrate this, let us observe emphatically that the phrase "see God" does not refer to any manifestation of His glory visible to the eye of sense. It is to the far deeper sight of the soul that Christ refers: to feel in the spirit His presence to exult in the fellowship of the Infinite, Perfect, and Eternal One that is to see God. (1) None but the pure in heart can see Him. The proof of this lies in the fact that the vision of the soul rises from its affections; the heart can see that only which it loves. (2) To the pure in heart the full glory of the Divine nature reveals itself.
III. That vision is its own exceeding blessedness. (1) It is blessed because to see God satisfies the longings of the heart. The restlessness vanishes. The distractions of change cease. Man's soul is at home with God. Therefore, "Blessed are the pure in heart." (2) It is blessed because it clothes life in glory. (3) It is blessed because it is the dawning of immortal hope.
E. L. Hull, Sermons,1st series, p. 180.
(with Titus 1:15)
The two texts are two motives. With one voice they enforce purity, but each by its own argument and with its own persuasion. The one looks rather at the future, the other at the present; the one tells us how purity shall enable us to move healthily and wholesomely among our fellows, the other how it shall fit and qualify us for that beatific vision which is, being interpreted, the inheritance of the saints in light.
I. St. Paul is addressing a loved convert, charged with the temporary oversight of the young Church of Crete. "To the pure," he says, "all things are pure; but to the defiled nothing is pure." If the heart be defiled, the result must be the contamination of the living and moving and acting man. Sin secretly cherished becomes not more a disease than a pestilence. To the impure nothing is pure; he carries defilement with him. St. Paul speaks of the intellect and the conscience as sharing the purity or else the impurity of the heart. The impure heart makes the conscience itself impure. By degrees it not only loses its sensitiveness to right and wrong; worse far than all this, it comes even to confuse, to distort, and to invert its own vision, and to be no longer a trustworthy index, when the man for once would consult it on some question of practical duty.
II. The motive was a strong one which said, "To the pure all things are pure." Be pure in heart, and you shall find or else make purity everywhere. Be pure in heart, and intellect shall be pure, and conscience; no film shall cloud the mental vision, no stain shall sully the mirror of duty. But "blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God." This lifts the matter into a higher region still, and tells how, not mind alone, not conscience alone, but the very spirit and soul of the man, hangs upon purity of heart for its welfare and for its life. If there be in any of us the desire hereafter or here to see God, to see Him in His beauty, and to see Him in His goodness, and to see Him in His truth if we feel that not to see Him is misery, that never to see Him would indeed be the "second death" we must become pure in heart.
C. J. Vaughan, Oxford and Cambridge Journal,November 4th, 1880; see also Temple Sermons,p. 390, and Christian World Pulpit,vol. xx., p. 52.
I. Purity of heart is the absence of anything that troubles, that darkens passion, greed, selfish ambition. Purity of heart! not merely freedom from ceremonial defilement: that was only the husk intended to protect the ripening fruit, the precious idea, within. When the seed is ripe the husk parts and breaks away. Purity of heart! not merely purity of act; cleanness, soundness of affections as well as will, the spirit to which evil gives no pleasure, rather inspires loathing and contempt.
II. And now the blessing: "For they shall see God." Of what time is this said? Of the sight of Him in the world beyond the grave, the Beatific Vision? We must not exclude this meaning, if for no other reason, because it is a meaning which the beloved Apostle saw in the words. Yet we shall be going against the spirit of all the Beatitudes if we make that the only meaning. The blessings promised throughout are not merely future blessings, but present: "Blessed are..." They are the graces, beauties, dignities, of the kingdom of heaven; and the kingdom of heaven is not future only, but present, set up, even as our Lord spoke, among men. The Beatific Vision itself is to begin on earth. "Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God," not only by-and-by, but even now.
III. We see in our Lord's words an image of the manner in which the highest spiritual truth is attained by man, and of the hindrances which prevent his attaining it. The image naturally suggested by His words, taken together, is of a man looking down into water and seeing the moon and the stars, the glories of heaven, mirrored in it. If the sight is to be firmly and clearly seen, the surface must be clean and still like some deep, calm mountain lake, not clouded with scum and weeds, nor blackened by gusts or cross-currents, not fretted like the shallow rapid stream over the inequalities of its pebbly bed. God reveals Himself so the thought seems to run in the heart if the heart be clean and still. The man whose heart is distracted with the cares and ambitions of the world, blackened with gusts of evil passion, cannot see God; the faculty is paralyzed, gone. He may try to look, may catch a broken sight for a moment, but he cannot look steadily, or there has gathered a film over the surface and he can see nothing.
E. C. Wickham, Wellington College Sermons,p. 59.
"Call no man happy till he dies" is what the old Greek sage said, and it was supposed to be a very sage saying indeed. The happiness which is implied in that poor comfort is of a very negative kind. It simply means that you will be happy because you will have done with things. It hopes for the calm of a corpse, for the rest of the grave knows nothing of any open gates beyond. The greatest philosopher, the grandest sage of all, says, "Happy arethe pure in heart." If you can only get purity, then you can reap your harvests in mid-winter, you can bask in sunlight when the sky is dark, and your fireside shall glow in grateful content when there is no fire behind the bars.
I. Happiness and the heart are put together. This happiness is real, because its home is in the heart. That is its seat of power.
II. Even Jesus cannot give you happiness while self and Satan rule. He cannot pair happiness with iniquity. If you are to be happy, sin must die. Christ came to kill it; hence that grandest of texts, "Behold the Lamb of God, who taketh away the sin of the world." If you will open your heart to admit Jesus, that He may come on His sin-killing errand, then as surely as He crosses the threshold, so surely shall you see two twin angels coming just behind Him with brows laden with glory; and the name of the one is Happiness, and the name of the other is Purity.
III. The pure in heart shall see God. The sight and knowledge of God are the cause and current of the Christian's joy. The pure in heart shall stand in the face of the King, in the presence of the eyes of Royalty; and the gifts which they receive shall be according to His infinite love, and according to His infinite power.
IV. They shall see God (1) in nature's mirror. Creation's visions and voices in every colour and in every key-note will prompt the pure in heart with remembrance of the Father that made them all. (2) In His providence. (3) In the mysteries they cannot understand.
J. Jackson Wray, Penny Pulpit(New Series), No. 1,114.
References: Matthew 5:8. Christian World Pulpit,vol. ii., p. 350; W. Dorling, Ibid.,vol. vi., p. 168; J. Lloyd, Ibid.,vol. xxix., p. 238; J. E. Vaux, Sermon Notes,1st series, p. 92; Bishop Barry, Cheltenham College Sermons,p. 143; J. Oswald Dykes, Manifesto of the King,p. 119; G. Salmon, Contemporary Pulpit,vol. ii., p. 129; J. M. Neale, Sermons for Children,p. 88.