What you're reading for this morning will begin in the book of Deuteronomy chapter 28 and we're going to read verses 1 through 19 and then we'll be turning over into Matthew's Gospel chapter 5 for the first three verses of that chapter. But we begin now with Deuteronomy 28, beginning at verse 1. Listen to this. This is the Word of God. And if you faithfully obey the voice of the Lord your God, being careful to do all his commandments that I command you today, The Lord your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth, and all these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you if you obey the voice of the Lord your God. Blessed shall you be in the city and blessed shall you be in the field. Blessed shall be the fruit of your womb, and the fruit of your ground, and the fruit of your cattle, the increase of your herds, and the young of your flock. Blessed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl. Blessed shall you be when you come in, and blessed shall you be when you go out. The Lord will cause your enemies who rise against you to be defeated before you. They shall come out against you one way and flee before you seven ways. The Lord will command the blessing on you in your barns and in all that you undertake. And He will bless you in the land that the Lord your God is giving you. The Lord will establish you as a people holy to Himself as He has sworn to you, if you keep the commandments of the Lord your God and walk in His ways. And all the peoples of the earth shall see that you are called by the name of the Lord, and they shall be afraid of you. And the Lord will make you abound in prosperity, in the fruit of your womb, and in the fruit of your livestock, and in the fruit of your ground, within the land that the Lord swore to your fathers to give you. The Lord will open to you His good treasury, the heavens, to give the rain to the land in its season, and to bless all the work of your hands. and you shall lend to many nations, and you shall not borrow. And the Lord will make you the head, not the tail, and you shall only go up and not down if you obey the commandments of the Lord your God, which I command you today, being careful to do them. And if you do not turn aside from any of the words that I command you today, to the right or to the left, to go after other gods to serve them. But, if you will not obey the voice of the Lord your God, or be careful to do all His commandments and His statutes that I command you today, then all these curses shall come upon you and overtake you. Cursed shall you be in the city, and cursed shall you be in the field. Cursed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl. Cursed shall be the fruit of your womb, and the fruit of your ground, the increase of your herds, and the young of your flock. Cursed shall you be when you come in, and cursed shall you be when you go out." Then from Matthew, Chapter 5, beginning at verse 1. Seeing the crowds, he went up on the mountain. And when he sat down, his disciples came to him, and he opened his mouth and taught them, saying, Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." And that is the reading of the Word of God. I love this story. I hope it is not one of these urban legends. It's about a high school, either baccalaureate service or graduation service. And the rule came down, of course, from the public school authorities, you shall not mention the name of God in this public ceremony. And so, the valedictorian, I believe it is, gets up and gives his address. And then at the end of his address, he sneezes. And the whole graduating class said, God bless you. Don't you hope that's a true story? Oh, is that ever great. This is how we use this word. God bless you and keep you. I have been so blessed. What a blessing this person has been to me. Now, all those are legitimate uses of the word blessing. But it doesn't yet get down to the depths of what the Bible has in mind when it speaks about blessing. It is not a reference to good fortune. It's not a reference to feeling good. Blessing is the result of being in a covenant relationship with God. And we would not be distorting the scripture if we would say something like this. Covenant blessings upon you. Well, I'm going to proclaim this morning, blessedness upon the people who should have been cursed. Jesus Christ comes and speaks to the covenant people who have broken the law of God, are now living out the evidence of their rebellion against God because they are an occupied people. The Romans are over them. They are cursed. And Jesus comes and boldly teaches them this. Blessings of the covenant upon you who are cursed. Hey, that's why it's called Good News. I'm going to, this morning, divide this into three little sections. One is blessing. The other is a brief description of those who are under the curse. We call it being poor in spirit. And then, the good news from the Savior about what he's going to do for the people who are cursed. He's going to lead them confidently into the kingdom of heaven. Blessed, poor, kingdom of heaven. Let's put up a little context here first. Here's the context. It says Jesus goes up and sits down and His disciples come to Him. His disciples come to Him. Disciple means a learner. Last Sunday, on Easter, we were saying that Matthew's Gospel is the only one that contains this grand commission which includes these words. Make disciples and teach them whatsoever I have commanded you. And Matthew's gospel is also the only one that has a large section, the Sermon on the Mount, which gathers together All of these wonderful teachings of Jesus. So if you were to say, well, if I'm going to be a disciple of Jesus, what am I going to learn? What would it be to be a follower of Jesus Christ? Here it is. In chapters five through seven. This is what a learner of Jesus Christ looks like. And we could summarize the whole thing as we did 14 years ago like this. The blessing of God. precedes obedience to God. And again, see, that's why it's called good news. He doesn't say, now when you have obeyed, then I will bless. That didn't work. The people rebelled. And so God, in His mercy, turns everything upside down. First I'm going to bless, and then the blessing will enable you to obey. This is what being a disciple is all about. Somebody who knows, I am blessed to the end of obeying Him. And the disciples came to Him. They wanted to hear this. And they wanted to learn and they're trusting that He is the One who has the words of truth for His people. Alright, that's the setup. That's the context. Now hear what Jesus says. First, blessed. Now in the Old Testament, when you come across the word blessed, the majority of times they're using one word, and that word comes from the idea of kneeling down. And really, it's not so much talking about what's happening with your knees, it's talking about what happens when you are kneeling down. Two things that happen. When you go down on your knees, in the Old Testament, it is to receive a pronouncement over you. The second thing would be, and while you are on your knees in your humility, you are looking up and declaring the greatness of the One who is pronouncing blessing on you. But that first sign, you go down in order that the blessing would be pronounced. I think of those stories about the knights. You know, when knighthood was in bloom in the Middle Ages, and in all those movies I saw with Tony Curtis and Richard Todd and things like that, there's always somebody being brought into knighthood and the king stands there with a sword, the knight goes down on one knee and then the king taps him on the shoulder and then on the head. And by doing this, he is changing the status of this man. And often with the change in the status, he's also bringing some kind of a declaration of what kind of an estate he's going to give him. And then the knight, in response, on his knee, looks up and says, Sire, I do your bidding. Send me where you want to go. The two sides. of the meaning of blessing. You can see this, these two sides brought together in the Old Testament in Genesis 14. When Melchizedek comes and meets Abram, Abram has just come from the defeat of the kings who had kidnapped his nephew Lot. And Melchizedek meets him and this is what he says, Blessed be Abram by God Most High. There's the pronouncement coming down upon him. And then, Melchizedek, in the same breath, turns around and says, And blessed be God Most High. See the two sides? Something's coming down upon you, so that you now will respond with blessing that goes up to the giver of every good and perfect gift. Isn't this what the Apostle Paul was talking about? He changed the vocabulary, of course, from Hebrew into Greek. Here, now the language of blessing means speaking good about other people and about God, but here Paul says in Ephesians, Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us. See that? The two are fitting together. Well, now the reason that there is this blessing pronounced upon people in the Scripture, I say it is because They are in a covenant relationship with God. You just scan some of the uses of the ideas of blessing, and you'll see that covenant theme that is all the way through, beginning with Adam and Eve. And He created them, male and female, and He blessed them, and said, Be fruitful and multiply and subdue the creation. And he comes to Noah, and he repeats the same thing. He says, is he blessed? Noah. Comes to Abraham, and he says, in you all the families of the earth will be blessed. Comes to Israel and makes covenant with Israel, and the benediction of Aaron goes upon the people. The Lord bless you and keep you. The text that we read this morning from Deuteronomy 28. Blessed shall you be in the city. Blessed you shall be in the field. When David hears the promise of God that there's going to be someone who is going to sit on that throne and rule forever, David says, it is with your blessing that my house will be blessed. And then comes the new covenant. Before God tells Jeremiah about the new covenant that's going to be made, this is what he says. And they will once again speak this word in the land of Judah. The Lord bless you, O abode of righteousness. Alright. It's against that background that we can hear the Lord Jesus Christ gathering His disciples to Himself and beginning not with the word, Cursed are you because you have not obeyed God, but instead He begins, contrary to our expectations, Contrary to the message of all the world. Blessed are you. You see, you can't be blessed in this biblical sense without being in covenant with God. being bonded to God. Now, you may respond to me, and you've got friends, and you've got relatives who will say, well, hey, I'm happy, and I'm content. I don't know what the meaning of all this blessed stuff is about, but I'm doing just fine the way I am, and I'm living the good life, and all of that kind of thing. Well, listen, friends, blessing does not mean good fortune. You're talking about good fortune. Blessing does not mean just happiness and delight. Blessing means something that endures and is guaranteed to endure. And your present state of happiness is going to change. Happiness referring to the happenstances around you. Your situation is going to change. And your health and your beauty, and your wealth, and your friends, those statuses will change. Therefore, we do not call those the blessings of God. The blessings have the covenant promise of God behind them. A blessing is something that is guaranteed. Blessing. Second category. Are the poor in spirit, I'm going to give you a synonym this morning, are the cursed. You see, the word for poor in the Old Testament comes from a word meaning to dangle down. Dangling down. Drooping. And so the following people were called the danglers down, or we translate it, the poor. The sick, the oppressed, and the financially broke. Now, we still use language like this today, don't we? You say, well, how's he doing? Well, he's in poor health. Did you hear that? Poor. How do you feel it? Well, I'm feeling kind of poorly these days. You see that? You still have some remnant of that idea of poverty that is bigger than just your pocketbook. Talks about despair, about brokenness, about drooping. Well, how do people get that way? It is a consequence of the fall. I'm not saying that you necessarily in your own life have committed some great sin that's going to cause you to be drooping. I'm saying everybody knows what it is to droop in this broken and this fallen world. Now hear this. That drooping is the flip side of the covenant. God had said, remember? If you obey Me, this is what will happen to you. You will be blessed. If you disobey Me, you will droop. You will be cursed. You will come to nothing. That is what the idea of cursing is all about. And when you read on in that list, he says this. You will have disease. You will have oppression. You will have poverty. All of these, gathered in the Old Testament, are translated as you will be poor. Your health is going to come to nothing. Your freedom is going to come to nothing. Your wealth, your influence, it will all come to nothing. Now, when you read the Old Testament, you begin to understand that the poor became a symbol of all of Israel under the curse. You know, the people did not obey, and because they did not obey, God scattered the ten tribes off into the nations, The tribe of Judah, he took into the captivity in Babylon. You know what was left in the land? This land that was supposed to be blessed? Oh, blessed is the fertility of your animals and of your ground! You know what's left in the land? The poor. That's all. So what becomes the great symbol of what it is to be the people of God in the Old Testament? It's the people who are poor under the curse. Now I say this morning, you and I may not be feeling sick. We may be feeling pretty good today. Maybe we don't feel abused. Maybe financially we're doing okay and we're not broke. But listen to what Jesus is going to say to us. If you want to be blessed by me, You've got to admit first that you're cursed by me. You hear that? If you're going to get the blessing of God, you need to realize, I'm sick in spirit. I am broke in spirit. I am helpless and without influence in spirit. I am dangling down. Or maybe we could go back to our first image and say this, I need to kneel and I need to admit what the problem is. Jesus says, these are the people I have come to bless, the poor in spirit. Okay, now what gives Jesus the right to do this? How can he, contrary to the expectations of what surely the scribes and the Pharisees were expecting, how can he gather together his motley crew and say, I now am going to pick up the covenant blessings, and I'm going to pronounce it upon the people who do not deserve it, and even before they can begin to obey me, they are going to hear my word of blessing. What gives him the right to do this? Well, this is chapter 5. In chapter 3 we heard this, Jesus has come and was baptized of John. Do you remember how John rebelled against that? I need to be baptized of you, and you come to be baptized of me. Jesus said, it is necessary for us to fulfill all righteousness. And what he meant by that was, I have come to identify with my people and the need of my people for cleansing and the washing away of sins, and I am the one who will do it. It is Jesus, the baptized, who is going to take upon himself the sins of his people. That's the one. who can stand and declare, blessed are you. But he's not just baptized. This is Jesus, the defeater of Satan, who is speaking these words. In the chapter before, He was driven by the Spirit into the wilderness, and he was tempted there of Satan for 40 days and 40 nights, and the evil one could not touch him. And Jesus refused to bow down and worship the evil one, taking any kind of shortcut to own all the nations of the world. Instead, He is going to secure the nations to Himself, because He is going to go to the cross. And he is going to be triumphant over the judgment upon sin, and he is going to rise again from the dead in triumph over all of the consequences of sin. That's why he can stand there and call a people to himself and begin this way. So certain is my triumph over sin and death. that all those who come to learn of me and trust of me, I now declare to you in your brokenness. Blessed are you. The hands of God are upon you to change your status and to bring a guarantee. That's the third thing. What's the guarantee? Blessed are the poor in spirit, For theirs is the kingdom of heaven. That's what he's guaranteeing. The kingdom of heaven as that full and complete removal of all of the curse. Guaranteed? Well, you know, I was taught that when Matthew's talking about the Kingdom of Heaven, he's using a kind of euphemism for the Kingdom of God because he doesn't want to offend the Jews. I probably taught you that. It's kind of a common understanding. But about two years ago, I was reading Gerhardus Voss, and something that he wrote a hundred years ago, and he said, Jesus, when Matthew's talking about the Kingdom of Heaven, he's not trying to avoid saying God. Whenever heaven is mentioned, it is mentioned not as the place of comfort, it is mentioned as the place of supernatural power. For instance, they come to Jesus and they say, by what authority do you do these things? And Jesus says, I will ask you a question. The baptism of John, where does he get that authority? Is it from heaven? See? Is it from the supernatural power and commission of God, or is it from men? And here Jesus is declaring to us, this is what I am promising you. This is what I am blessing you with. The supernatural power of God will be yours in the future. But blessing precedes obedience. And the supernatural power of God will be the resource that His people will use even now in this broken and fallen world. So, what is Jesus saying to those who come to Him and who trust Him and want to learn from Him? This is what He's saying. Covenant blessings. Right now, I pronounce upon you who are telling me you don't deserve it. And I promise you the power of the Kingdom of God. And beloved, that is why we call it good news. How do you believe that? Oh, amen. Come. Let's believe this together. Oh, and now our Father God, may your power be made perfect in weakness. May your promises unfold as we confess to you we don't deserve them. Will you be pleased as we bow our hearts before you and can offer nothing in exchange for your blessing but our praise. Please, may the strength and the peace and the blessing of God rest upon us for our good and for your glory. For this is what we pray and we dare to pray it with confidence because we're praying in Jesus' name Amen.