“Till we are poor in spirit we are not capable of receiving grace. He who is swollen with an opinion of self-excellency and self-sufficiency, is not fit for Christ. He is full already. If the hand be full of pebbles, it cannot receive gold. The glass is first emptied before you pour in wine. God first empties a man of himself, before he pours in the precious wine of his grace.”

Paradoxically, King David’s most notorious sins give us a glimpse at just what makes him a great man of God. You probably know the story. After years on the run from Saul, David’s kingdom is finally established. But in his security, he began to make moral compromises. He already ignored God’s explicit command in Deuteronomy 17:17 that Israel’s king “shall not acquire many wives for himself,” which is subtly told to us in 2 Samuel 5:13: “And David took more concubines and wives from Jerusalem…”

But then we come to 2 Samuel 11. It begins with David remaining safely in Jerusalem rather than going out to war with his armies. Then it sees the king lusting over the wife of one of his soldiers, impregnating her, and having her husband killed in battle. Thus, in one chapter, the man after God’s own heart explicitly broke Commandments 6-10 and implicitly broke Commandments 1-5. How can we honestly number such a man among the people of God?

In response to David being rebuked by the prophet Nathan, David composed Psalm 51, which includes these great prayers:

Have mercy on me, O God,

according to your steadfast love;

according to your abundant mercy

blot out my transgressions.

Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,

and cleanse me from my sin!

For I know my transgressions,

and my sin is ever before me.

Against you, you only, have I sinned

and done what is evil in your sight,

so that you may be justified in your words

nd blameless in your judgment…

Create in me a clean heart, O God,

and renew a right spirit within me…

For you will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it;

you will not be pleased with a burnt offering.

The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit;

a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise. (vv. 1-4, 11, 16-17)

Here we see the great truth of salvation. God’s people are not the perfectly righteous, for no one is. Those whom God favors acknowledge their sins and trust Him alone for salvation. As Yahweh said in Isaiah 66:2:

But this is the one to whom I will look:

he who is humble and contrite in spirit

and trembles at my word.

The blessed are like David. They confess their spiritual poverty and put their faith in the Lord alone to save them.

POOR IN SPIRIT

Last week, we began our study of the Beatitudes by briefly considering their context within the Sermon on the Mount and then focusing upon the word that begins each: blessed. From that study, we concluded that being blessed meant being supremely and lasting happy because we have found favor with God Himself. Indeed, we emphasized that this blessedness or happiness is not a momentary grace; rather, it is a state of being. Thus, the Beatitudes are not a list of virtues to cultivate, which would mean we must be poor in spirit, mournful, etc. in order to be blessed. No, the Beatitudes are characteristics that the blessed are known by, to some degree at least.

Keeping that in mind, we now come to the first Beatitude: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

What does it mean to be poor in spirit? We can answer that question negatively and positively.

Negatively, being poor in spirit is not the same as simply being financially poor. It is somewhat popular today, as it has occasionally been in history, to think of the poor as being inherently more righteous than the wealthy. However, William Tyndale is correct that:

Riches is the gift of God, given man to maintain the degrees of this world, and therefore not evil; yea, and some must be poor and some rich, if we shall have an order in this world. And God, our Father, divideth riches and poverty among his children, according to his godly pleasure and wisdom, so doth not poverty certify thee; but to put thy trust in the living God maketh thee heir thereof.

Indeed, while Jesus warned against the dangers of riches, there is no virtue in poverty. Remember that in Exodus 23:3 God forbid the Israelites from being “partial to a poor man in his lawsuit,” which was obviously a tendency even among the ancients. Of course, Proverbs gives us the most balanced understanding, saying:

Remove far from me falsehood and lying;

give me neither poverty nor riches;

feed me with the food that is needful for me,

lest I be full and deny you

and say, “Who is the LORD?”

or lest I be poor and steal

and profane the name of my God. (30:8-9)

As we noted last week, although the majority of people are born into physical poverty, no one is born into spiritual poverty. It is an internal work of the Holy Spirit.

Neither is spiritual poverty what Kent Hughes calls showy humility. Martin Lloyd-Jones talks about encountering such a man, who said, “You know, I am a mere nobody, a very unimportant man, really. I do not count; I am not a great man in the Church; I am just one of those men who carry the bag for the minister.” The doctor noted:

He was anxious that I should know what a humble man he was, how ‘poor in spirit’. Yet by his anxiety to make it known he was carrying the very thing he was trying to establish… the man who thus, at it were, glories in his poverty of spirit and thereby proves he is not humble. (47)

We are each made in God’s image and, in this life, even the wicked still have God’s common grace upon them. Thus, it is not beneficial to act as though we have no positive qualities or worth. For instance, an Olympic athlete who denies his own excellence exhibits false humility. True humility, however, is acknowledging that all of his greatest efforts contribute nothing to his worth before God and that God is the supplier of that very excellence. Indeed, Bach was known to begin his compositions with a prayer for help and concluded with writing SDG (soli Deo gloria). He glorified God through acknowledging his dependency upon Him, and it would have only been a false humility for him to insist that his music was bad.

Thomas Watson makes the distinction between being spiritually poor and being poor in spirit. The Laodiceans were spiritually poor, as Revelation 3:17 says of them, “For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.” Their dependency upon material wealth was impoverishing them spiritually. Of course, unbelievers are also spiritually poor. Yet, like the Laodiceans, most cannot see their true poverty, and Watson is right to note that “he is in the worst sense poor who has no sense of his poverty” (33).

Positively, being poor in spirit means acknowledging our wholesale spiritual poverty. The Greek word for poor is πτωχος, which as Kent Hughes notes:

It comes from a verbal root that denotes “to cower and cringe like a beggar.” In classical Greek ptochos came to mean “someone who crouches about, wretchedly begging.” In the New Testament it bears something of this idea because it denotes poverty so deep that the person must obtain his living by begging. He is fully dependent on the giving of others. He cannot survive without help from the outside. Thus an excellent translation is “beggarly poor.” (17)

Indeed, if we are not careful to note that a beggarly poverty is meant, we may easily and subconsciously think of American poverty. Only homelessness really comes close to resembling the beggarly poverty of the ancient world, and even then, we still have homeless shelters, soup kitchens, and other such programs to give aid. But still, it reflects the original idea of complete and utter dependence upon others. That is the kind of poverty that Jesus speaks of.

But it is not material poverty but poverty of spirit. The Greek word πνευμα, like the Hebrew ruach, can mean spirit, wind, or breath. Here, as is frequently the case, it refers “to the inner person, with his feelings or inner strength” (Beeke and Smalley, RST Vol 2, 231). Thus, by saying poverty of the spirit, Jesus is moving past all external factors and going to the root of who we are. And crucially, all of humanity is poor spiritually. Although God created us with the immeasurable wealth of dwelling forever with Him, we renounced those riches through our sin. All sin is a rejection of God’s goodness and a declaration of our own supposed divinity. Yet that rebellion leaves us destitute. Try as we may, we have nothing apart from God. He is the almighty Creator, who has created all things, and He is the Giver of the spirit of life within each of us. And in our arrogance, we commit treason against Him.

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