Thursday, January 6, 2011
The Beatitudes, Part 4 of 50
TEXT: Matthew 5:1-12
IDEA: The Sermon on the Mount is much more than an interim ethic for the first-century disciples.
PURPOSE: To listeners realize that the Sermon on the Mount has a long reach.
We have been thinking about the different ways people have applied the Sermon on the Mount. We have looked at several approaches. What are they?
If we imagine walking around the globe on foot, the first view sees the Sermon as a set of instructions on how to swim an ocean.
The second approach warns us that such a swim is impossible and if we try to make the swim, we will drown.
The third approach contends that if the citizens of every nation will take the Sermon seriously, then we can swim the ocean together.
(A fourth approach avoids all the problems of the first three views . . .)
I. The Sermon on the Mount has no direct application to people today.
These folks say that the Sermon is about a lifestyle that Jesus gave only to his disciples who heard him. They were about to enter the kingdom that Jesus was going to set up on earth.
After all, Jesus declared in Matthew 4:17 “Repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is near.”
The Sermon on the Mount was an instruction manual for the two or three years before the kingdom would be ushered in at the end of Jesus’ life.
Jesus offered his kingdom to the Jewish leaders, but they rejected it.
Therefore, because the kingdom was delayed, the Sermon is no longer operative.
When Jesus sets up his kingdom sometime in the future, then in that golden age, the instructions will become operative again.
One implication is that Christians today have no business praying the Lord’s Prayer (which is a major part of the Sermon on the Mount) because it is not for us. It applies only to Christians in the future.
II. What are some difficulties with this approach to the Sermon?
At the end of the Beatitudes Jesus said, “Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.” If this happens in the millennium, God’s golden age, who are the persecutors?
In Matthew 6 Jesus warned about want and worry. Would these be part of his kingdom?
There’s a great deal in the Sermon to make us uneasy, but there isn’t much in the sermon itself or in its context that tells us to relegate it to some far off future time.
Matthew wrote his Gospel decades after the death and resurrection of Jesus. He wrote to churches in the first century. What would the Sermon on the Mount mean to those early readers?
