A Sermon by John Macdonald
Matthew 5:8. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
The state of true religion among the Jews was very low when Christ entered on His public ministry. Instead of adhering to the Word of God as the only rule of faith and sound morality, their teachers attached equal, if not greater, importance to the traditions of the elders. Hence their religion degenerated into a bare conformity to external rites and ceremonies, chiefly of man’s invention. Instead of informing the understanding and amending the heart, these observances tended only to cherish pride and foster the vain imagination: to perform external ceremonies would be enough to procure them acceptance with God. “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of the law, and anise, and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgement, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.” “Why do ye also transgress the commandment of God by your tradition?” And again, “In vain they do worship Me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men”.
The religion which Jesus taught His countrymen was quite different. Its doctrines and precepts were invariably addressed to the heart and declared that every religious creed is useless unless it is accompanied by a thorough change of heart and a uniform regard to all God’s commandments. Christ soon attracted the notice of the Jews by the extraordinary character of His teaching. On this account multitudes began to follow Him, many of them with unworthy motives. In the last verse of the previous chapter, it is said that great multitudes followed him from Galilee and from Decapolis and from Jerusalem and from Judea and from beyond Jordan. And in the first verse of this chapter we are told that, when He saw them, He went up into a mountain and delivered before them the longest of all His discourses left on record. He began this remarkable sermon by pointing out various dispositions of mind which he pronounced blessed. And purity of heart, the subject of our present discourse, occupies a prominent place among them.
Our remarks on this important subject will proceed in the following order: (1) where purity of heart proceeds from, (2) what it implies, (3) some observations on the promise in the text
1This John Macdonald (1800-1854) was a minister in Helmsdale in the far north of Scotland. Alexander Macleod of Uig and Rogart said: “The more I knew of him and saw of him, the more I valued, esteemed and enjoyed him as a real Christian and a faithful minister of Christ”. The sermon is taken, with editing, from Macdonald’s Memoir, by John Mackay of Lybster; the volume consists of Macdonald’s life, correspondence and sermons.
1. Where purity of heart proceeds from. Whatever different shades of meaning the word heart may have in Scripture, at times it plainly signifies all the powers of the mind. Thus: “A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you; and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh” (Ezek 36:26). Again: “And when He had removed him [Saul], He raised up unto them David to be their king; to whom also He gave testimony, and said, I have found David the son of Jesse, a man after Mine own heart, which shall fulfil all My will” (Acts 13:22). To suppose that the word heart in such parts of Scripture only implies the active powers, as it does in ethical writings, would be to maintain what cannot possibly happen: that one part of our faculties may undergo a saving change and the others remain just in their former state.
No sooner is the understanding enlightened than the active powers receive a new impulse and the individual’s whole conduct is changed. Whatever reformation may happen in one’s religious or moral character, unless it proceeds from an enlightened understanding it will resolve itself into selfishness, expediency or hypocrisy. The heart of man is described in the Word of God as “deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked”. Hence it necessarily follows that, by nature, we have nothing of that state of mind which is necessary for seeing God, in the way signified in the text.
Experience fully agrees with the declaration of Scripture in establishing this truth. If we turn our attention for a moment to human nature in its progress from barbarity to the highest pitch of civilization which man has ever attained without the aid of revelation, we will find this confirmed abundantly. Do we not see that the most revolting practices were practised by some of those who had the highest reputation for wisdom and virtue? As to their notions of Deity and a future state of rewards and punishments, how foolish they seem to those who are favoured with the light of revelation? If all the discoveries and maxims of the sages of antiquity were collected into one mass and all the most objectionable elements were removed from this accumulation of boasted wisdom and virtue, nothing better could be inscribed on the remainder than this: “The world by wisdom knew not God”. Surely if there was anything in the mind of man capable of bringing forth purity of heart, it had abundance of time and opportunity in past ages for bringing this hidden quality into action. But “do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit?” (Mt 7:17).
But though men, without the aid of revelation, could never bring about the change in their nature which purity of heart implies, we might suppose that a clear revelation from heaven would assuredly effect a thorough change of heart? But if these things were sufficient of themselves to convert men, how could such wickedness continue to exist in places where the gospel has been preached for ages? How could the lives of so many professing Christians be stained with such evident marks of a filthy and impure heart and with spots that are not the spots of God’s children?
“It is the Spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing” (Jn 6:63). “The letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life.” But if there is nothing inherent in human nature to which purity of heart can be attributed, it must be ascribed, as the Bible teaches, to the agency of the Holy Spirit in regeneration. “Verily, verily,” says Christ to Nicodemus, “I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. . . . That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.” “Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and the renewing of the Holy Ghost.”
The inseparable connection between regeneration and purity of heart is plainly laid down by the Apostle Peter: “Seeing ye have purified your souls in obeying the truth through the Spirit unto unfeigned love of the brethren, see that ye love one another with a pure heart fervently: being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever” (1 Pet 1:22). As if he had said, I know you are born again; therefore let purity of heart, which necessarily accompanies regeneration, be exemplified in your conduct towards the brethren; it is the Spirit of God that produces purity of heart as well as regeneration.
2. What purity of heart implies. Seeing God, as the expression is used in the text, signifies nothing less than the full enjoyment of Him in heaven. When we consider the connection between purity of heart and seeing God, it may be said to involve all the doctrines of the scheme of redemption in their application to a sinner, in order to prepare him for heaven. We shall for the present, however, confine our observations to three of the leading doctrines: faith, repentance and sanctification.
(1.) Purity of heart includes faith. Purity of heart implies a perception of the holiness and rectitude of the moral law, and also a firm belief in the sinfulness of man as a transgressor of it. It is only by viewing the heart in the mirror of the law of God that the moral depravity of our nature can appear to us. This, and this alone, is the proper standard of moral excellence. But man is by nature ignorant of its holiness, its spirituality, and its extent. “I was,” says Paul, “alive without the law once; but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died.”
The person whose eyes are opened to see the evil of sin views his own heart in this mirror. His moral condition is there brought to the touchstone. On the one hand he sees holiness, purity and excellence; on the other hand unholiness, impurity, depravity and everything vile. These woeful qualities are, as it were, the very essence of his nature. The law demands love to God and his neighbour. The disposition of his heart is hatred to God and his fellow creatures. So far is he from possessing holiness of heart, which the law requires, that his mind is fraught with malignity and the hellish disposition of him who robbed man of his original glory. “I know that the law is holy, but I am carnal, sold under sin.” Ever after knowing this, the believer considers the moral law to be the rule of his duty; and though salvation does not flow to him on account of any conformity to its precepts, he cannot therefore indulge in the sins which it condemns. He would wish, above all things, to be as holy as its utmost extent demands. “Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? God forbid.”
Faith in the Lord Jesus Christ is necessary for seeing God in the manner meant in the text, and is therefore involved in purity of heart. Because of sin, man lost the favour of God, and exposed himself to all the fatal consequences of his transgression. He is alienated from God in heart and life. All the powers of his mind are so corrupted that, without divine aid, he cannot exercise them, in any degree, in accordance with the will of his Maker. His whole conduct is, in God’s sight, one continued course of iniquity, and hence he justly merits God’s displeasure in time and throughout eternity. Nothing that he can do can give him any ground of hope in the mercy of God and, were he left to his own resources for deliverance, he could do nothing better than think of evading the eye of Jehovah by attempting to flee from his presence.
The plan of redemption through Christ, brought to light through the gospel, is the only way held out to a sinner for restoring him to his Maker’s favour. There Christ is declared to have answered all the demands that God’s law could make against the sinner, and to have removed the curse which his sin justly deserved. By so doing, Christ has consecrated a new and living way through which man may escape the punishment his sins deserve.
The person to whom the blessedness described in the text belongs is made to believe that it is only through faith in Christ, by the teaching of the Holy Spirit, he can be made a partaker of the blessings of the gospel, and so he rests his hope of acceptance with God solely on Christ’s merits. This faith does not consist in speculative views of the doctrines of Christianity and a general assent to the truths of the Bible. It involves – however mortifying it may be to the pride of human nature – a cordial acquiescence in the plan of salvation in all its parts. Christ Himself is the author and finisher of this faith. It is a saving grace, whereby a sinner receives Christ and rests upon Him alone for salvation, as He is offered in the gospel.
(2.) Purity of heart includes repentance unto life. It is plain from Scripture and experience that many people repent of committing certain sins, yet it is very different from what is called evangelical repentance. We are told that Judas repented of betraying Christ. Impressed with his guilt, he returned to those from whom he had received the wages of iniquity and declared that he had sinned in betraying the innocent blood. His repentance was strong enough to overpower his greed, the ruling passion which induced him to sell his Master for 30 pieces of silver, which in his remorse he returned to these wicked men. There are many instances of men who were struck with terror, arising from remorse of conscience as a result of committing gross sins. For some time they manifested a kind of repentance, but when their fears of punishment were allayed, they returned to their former habits, like the dog to his vomit, “and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire.”
Genuine repentance implies, in the first place, a firm belief in the evil of sin and of the hatred which God bears to it. Sin destroyed the happy communion which Man had with his Maker at first. It effaced his Maker’s image from his soul and placed him in the condition of an enemy to that Being whose laws he was bound to obey. He who is of purer eyes than to behold evil could no longer look upon man with delight.
The influence of sin is not confined to the disorder it brought into this world, but it extends to a future state; and its malignant nature is specially evident in the sufferings of Him who came to save sinners. When such sad consequences are the result of sin, the sinner who truly repents sees it as that abominable thing which is hateful to God. Hence the Psalmist’s confession: “Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in Thy sight”.
Again, true repentance involves hatred of sin. “I esteem,” says David, “all Thy precepts concerning all things to be right, and I hate every false way,” or every sin. “Under the influence of conviction,” says a great divine, “every sinner hates sin in this sense: that he regards it as the source of future punishment – that is, he dreads the sufferings, and hates the cause of it as such, and under the influence of this feeling he will occasionally abstain from many acts of transgression. But the penitent hates sin in its very nature, quite apart from the punishment it deserves. Being made the subject of grace, it is so disagreeable to his spiritual taste that he will avoid it with the greatest possible care. He finds a law in his members warring against the law of his mind, but sin is not more congenial to the one than it is hateful to the other.”
Further, repentance includes the forsaking of sin. This naturally follows the hatred of it. Whatever object is odious to someone, it is plain enough that he will try to avoid it. The believer does not slight the precept, “Cease to do evil”. He manifests, in the sight of all men, the genuineness of his repentance by forsaking the works of darkness in which he formerly indulged, which were the fruits of his unrenewed nature and the badges of the being whom he served. When he or others henceforth commit sin, it grieves his heart and draws tears from his eyes. The ungodly may make a mock of it, but to him every kind of sin is hateful. He is therefore careful to avoid the temptations which lead to it. It is not in his own strength, however, that he purposes to forsake his iniquity; his hope of success in this way is grounded on the promises given by Him who is more powerful than all his enemies – that sin should not have dominion over His followers.
(3.) Purity of heart includes sanctification. Like the various other graces which form the Christian character, this is of the operation of the Spirit of God; and the subject of this good work undergoes such a change that he perceives the excellence of spiritual objects and the detestable nature of sin. His will is renewed to such an extent that the motives of the Scriptures for attaining spiritual knowledge and improving moral character are not in vain. All the faculties and powers of his soul are elevated, fitting them for exercises to which previously they were both indisposed and inadequate. Such a work is not completed at once, but it will assuredly be carried on until the day of Jesus Christ. As the work is progressive, the subject of it moves onward in its course as he is conducted by the One who began it. And as the remainders of sin within him are gradually subdued, he becomes more and more conformed to the will of God.
The groundwork of sanctification is the conversion of the sinner. The term conversion implies that the unconverted person’s mind and life are changed and the new sentiments and habits are the result of the work of the Holy Ghost. The work begun in conversion cannot but come to a happy close. This constitutes part of Christ’s intercessory prayer for His people: “Father, sanctify them through Thy truth”. The subject of sanctification has, above every object, a view to God’s glory and cannot indulge in the practices of those whose chief desire is to indulge their pride and gratify their lusts. While his actions clearly show what kind of spirit he has, he strives diligently to add to his “faith virtue, and to virtue knowledge, and to knowledge temperance, and to temperance patience, and to patience godliness, and to godliness brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness charity”.
3. Some observations on the promise in the text. The whole human race must see God, to hear sentence pronounced on them according to their works. The wicked, who would neither be persuaded by the threatenings of the law or by the promises of the gospel to renounce their sins and return to the Lord, must at last appear before Him to receive their awful sentence. In this sense the wicked and the righteous will see God, though in a very different way. The pure in heart, while in this world, will see Him by faith in His Son. God is a Spirit, and so the views which His people get of Him are spiritual in nature. Man’s apostasy involved him so deeply in spiritual death that, before conversion, he has no perception at all of his Maker’s true character. When he hears of God’s attributes, the words are without meaning to him. “The fool has said in his heart, There is no God.”
The subjects of a saving change are awakened out of this deplorable state. When thus quickened from death in trespasses and sins, they behold God as a being of infinite perfections—perfect holiness, justice, mercy and truth. They see His holiness in His hatred of sin, His justice in the sufferings of Christ, His mercy in the redemption of sinners, and His truth in the execution of the sentence: “In the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die”. The people of God are exposed to many temptations in this world; by yielding to them their enjoyment may be marred, they may experience spiritual bondage and be subjected to the corrections of their heavenly Father. “If His children forsake My law, and walk not in My judgments; if they break My statutes, and keep not My commandments: then will I visit their transgression with the rod, and their iniquity with stripes” (Ps 89:30-32).
Under the impression of their guilt, they may for a season have to ask, “Will the Lord cast off for ever, and will He be favourable no more?” But when their spiritual bondage has ended, they obtain views of God that bring them in some measure to say, I love the Lord, because He has heard my voice and delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, and my feet from falling; I will therefore walk before the Lord in the land of the living.
They also see God in the works of His providence, as well as of His grace. While the ungodly ascribe their prosperity in life to their own wisdom, and their misfortunes to untoward secondary causes, these see the finger of God in their prosperity and their adverse circumstances. They see the hand of the Lord in the order and harmony which pervade the laws of the material world, in the succession of day and night, and in the change of the seasons. They receive instruction from the storms of winter and the quiet of summer, from the growth of spring and the abundance of harvest. The pure in heart see God in all these things.
The promise in the text, however, as already mentioned, refers chiefly to the blessedness of heaven, for the following reasons: (1.) In the description of the heavenly Jerusalem in the book of Revelation, the very same verb as in the original of our text is used to express the manner in which God’s servants shall there see His face, whereas a different verb is used in the original when Paul speaks of the manner in which He is seen by His people in this life. As far as I know, the same verb is not used in any other part of the New Testament to express the manner in which His people see Him in this life.
(2.) The promise is expressed in the future tense. If it referred to a blessedness which the pure in heart have already experienced, the present or past tense might as properly be used, since they in reality see God, though but darkly through a glass, even after they are regenerated.
Hence the promise here connected with purity of heart implies the full enjoyment of God in a future state of existence. The condition of the blessed in heaven is a subject placed so far beyond the reach of our understandings that our minds soon wander when we begin to speculate on it. “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him” (1 Cor 2:9).
We shall therefore only make the following very short observations on this part of the subject: As long as the righteous are in this world, their hearts are but relatively pure – pure only in comparison with what they were before they were effectually called. But in heaven no impure thought shall ever spring up in their minds. The least tincture of sin will not contaminate their now-perfect virtue to interrupt their full communion with God or to affect their indescribable happiness. Here they are harassed by the world, the flesh and the devil; but once they are admitted within the gates of heaven they are for ever placed beyond the reach of all their enemies – for “there shall in no wise enter into it any thing that defileth, neither whatsoever worketh abomination, or maketh a lie”. In this state of trial they often have to ask, “O, how the Lord’s song shall we sing within a foreign land?” But in heaven they shall, without intermission through the unceasing ages of eternity, sing the song of Moses and of the Lamb and tune their harps to sing the praises of Him who washed them from their sins in His own blood, and made them kings and priests unto God.
If the promise in the text involves all this, as it undoubtedly does, those to whom it belongs may well be pronounced indescribably happy. May God grant that we may be all fitted for the same exalted and endless enjoyment!