'The kingdom of heaven.'
This last promise is the same as the first--to express completeness, a
rounded whole. All the others are but elements of this.
That highest reward given to the perfectest saint is but the fuller
possession of what is given in germ to the humblest and sinfullest at
the very first. The poor in spirit gets it at the beginning.
It is not implied by this promise that a Christian man's blessedness
depends on the accident of some other person's behaviour to him, or that
martyrs have a place which none others can reach. But theirs is the
kingdom of heaven as a natural result of the character which brings
about persecution, and as a natural result of the development of that
character which persecution brings about. This promise, like all the
others, has its twofold fulfilment.
There is a present recompense.
Persecution is the result of a character which brings Christians into
the kingdom. Theirs is the kingdom--they are subjects. To them it is
given to enter.
Persecution makes the present consciousness of the possession of the
kingdom more vivid and joyous. It brings the enforced sense of a
vocation separate from the hostile world's. As Thomas Fuller puts it
somewhere, in troublous times the Church builds high, just as the men do
in cities where there is little room to expand on the ground level.
Persecution brightens and solidifies hope, and thus may become
infinitely sweet and blessed. How often it has been given to the martyr,
as it was given to Stephen, to see heaven opened and Jesus standing at
the right hand of God, as if risen to His feet to uphold as well as to
receive His servant. Paul and Silas made the prison walls ring with
their praises, though their backs were livid with wales and stained with
blood. And we, in our far smaller trials for Christ's sake, may have the
same more conscious possession of the kingdom and brightened hope of yet
fuller possession of it.
There is a future recompense in the perfect kingdom, where men are
rewarded according to their capacities. And if the way in which we have
met the world's evil has been right, then that will have made us fit for
a fuller possession.
In closing we recur to the thought of all these Beatitudes as a chain
and the beginning of all as being penitence and faith.
Many a poor man, or many a little child, may have a higher place in
heaven than some who have died at the stake for their Lord, for not our
history, but our character, determines our place there, and all the
fulness of the kingdom belongs to every one who with penitent heart
comes to God in Christ, and then by slow degrees from that root brings
forth first the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear.
Here is Jesus' ideal of character--poor in spirit, mourning, meek,
hungering and thirsting after righteousness, merciful, pure in heart,
peacemakers, persecuted for righteousness' sake. To be these is to be
blessed. And here is Jesus' ideal of what, over and above the inherent
blessedness of such a character, constitutes the true blessedness of a
soul--the possession of the kingdom of heaven, comfort from God, the
inheritance of the earth of which the inheritor may not own a yard, full
satisfaction of the longing after righteousness, the obtaining of mercy
from God, the name of sons of God, and, last as first, the possession of
the kingdom of heaven. Is Jesus' ideal yours? Do you believe that such a
character is the highest that a man can attain, that in itself it is
truly blessed, and will bring about results in contrast with which all
baser-born joys are coarse and false? Happy will you be if you so
believe, and if so believing you make the ideal which He paints your
aim, and therefore secure the blessedness which He attaches to it as
your exceeding great reward.