God’s Constitution, Pt 1: Introduction
2Corinthians 4:3-4 3And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. 4The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel that displays the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.
1Corinthians 2:14 12What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand what God has freely given us. 13This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual realities with Spirit-taught words. 14The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit.
Matthew 22:36-40 36“Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” 37Jesus replied: “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ 38This is the first and greatest commandment. 39And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
The Sermon on the Mount is found in the Book of Matthew chapters 5-7. I’ve come to understand it as God’s Constitution for living in the Kingdom of God and this posting is the introduction to a series of discussions about that Constitution. But the reader may notice that none of today’s verses actually come from the Sermon on the Mount.
The sermon on the Mount is a discourse regarding the Kingdom of God. It is not intended to bring people to God through acceptance of God’s Son as Savior, thus it is not an evangelical tool. But it can draw people to faith as it reveals God’s will for our lives. Still, it is written to Joe Believer, not Joe Sinner. If one purports to be a follower of Jesus then it seems to be a reasonable expectation that there is a certain expected way of living. Deciding to follow Jesus should not be a flippant decision, rather a deliberate one. The Matthew verse shown above defines that choice explicitly by showing that the greatest commandment is to follow God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. When God created Earth as part of his creation of the universe he created it to be perfect. But deception happened, sin happened, and perfection ended. But God, in his eternal nature, knew this was coming and had a plan ready in the form of his Son. When Jesus came he initiated a plan for the restoration of the Earth to the perfection God originally intended.
The Sermon on the Mount is not so much a list of things to do, or not to do, as it is a description of what that perfection looks like. God wants believers to live in such a way that their love for one another and their love for Jesus is revealed. If one looks at the first verses of the Sermon, called the Beatitudes, one finds an apparent contradiction. Mourners are often uncomforted, and the meek don’t inherit the earth. In the current world the Sermon seems anachronistic, even unreal, but in the restoration Jesus initiated and is continuing, the Sermon is a description of that restoration in action.
But people have a hard time with this. We live in the imperfect world and so we view things imperfectly, as if through a veil. The context of the verses from the Corinthians letters, shown above, is of unbelievers being blinded to the truth of the Gospel because they have not accepted Jesus as Savior and so do not have the Holy Spirit to open their eyes. We believers occasionally consider ourselves as having all the answers, of being all that and a bag of chips, because we do have the Holy Spirit. There is real danger here though because that attitude can close our minds to what the Holy Spirit wants us to know.
As we begin our study of the Constitution of the Kingdom we should keep our minds open. Here’s what I’m getting at. Early on in my walk with the Lord I decided to read through the Bible from beginning to end. There are many Bible reading programs out there for one’s phone or computer and they all suffer from one weakness: The attitude of the reader. When I read the first time, I was reading so I could say I read through the Bible, not reading to learn. I got very little out of the reading. I’m also a member of a prayer group of several people who, several times a week, read meditatively though a passage selected by the leader of that particular group. The difference between my early reading and this meditatively focused reading is profound for two reasons. First, more people means more views of the same verses and different understandings of the verses surface through the prayers. And second, meditative focus allows the Holy Spirit to speak in His still, small voice and allows us to hear Him. The point here is that successful application of the Sermon to our lives requires that we pray and listen to what the Holy Spirit is teaching in the various passages. When we read, we should pray, “What do have for me today, Father?”
Another thing to consider is that the Sermon presents an alternative way of thinking. The Disciples are shown that what they have learned from the Pharisees and Sadducees, or by extension what we have learned from the world is faulty. It is a retraining not so much a new training. The Sermon flies in the face of conventional thinking. We learn in Isaiah 55:8-9
8“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the LORD. 9“As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.
The believing life is an alternative way of living; it is a radical reinterpretation of life. It is difficult, but it is also freeing. The secret to successful living is to understand that what happens around or to the believer is not what counts. It is what happens in the believer.
As we begin to read through and discuss the three chapters there will be difficult passages. One section says that while we are not murderers, if we grumble and complain about another person, we are in effect committing a kind of murder, and another says the same sort of thing about adultery. Of course, this is not real murder or adultery, but it is a kind of killing of the spirit of that other person, or the spirit of the spouse of the adulterer. One might look at these sections and say to himself, “I can’t possibly keep these; I’m not even going to try.” That would be a mistake. I alluded before that the Sermon was not a pattern of life for all of society, but it is a sort of manifesto of the character, attitudes, and dangers of the believer, and it does present the nature of life in the Kingdom, and it does present information about the obedience and submission of the believer to his or her God. So, we should approach this discussion realizing that while these things are difficult, but we can do them if we have help. Help of course comes from Jesus through the Holy Spirit.