How do you read the Beatitudes? Are they just so much pie in the sky where the rubber can’t possibly meet the road? In other words, are they just some surreal ideal entirely disconnected from real living?

With the Beatitudes, the King summarizes elements of the privileged, enviable state of having God’s approval and favor as a citizen of His kingdom. To be blessed like this is to be spiritually prosperous and deeply contented. It is to know joy which is independent of circumstances.

We must understand, though, that our feeling of all these is always only in limited measure. The kingdom citizen does not always feel blessed, for we live in fallen flesh in a very dysfunctional world. Thus we might be inclined to read the Beatitudes with dubious doubts and cynical suspicions, imagining them as misty mirages of joy and problematic paradoxes of contentment. Though these appear as unattainable opposites of real life on this pitiful planet, the blessings of Jesus in the Beatitudes stand secure on His nature and character.

The Beatitudes tell us, among other things, facts about the nature of the King. And, since the King lives within the citizens of His kingdom, the new nature of the redeemed.

Source: a work in progress by me — a book about kingdom living based on the Sermon on the Mount.