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Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled. ~ Matthew 5:6
Today, we return to our study of the Beatitudes which is in essence the Lord Jesus description of the process involved in the changing of the human heart toward Him. All of us were born antagonistic to God due to the fact that we were influenced by the author sin. Once Eve availed herself to the cunning devil, there was no stopping the influence of the evil one in the human existence.
In Psalm 51:5 King David said it well when he wrote, "Behold, in iniquity was I brought forth, and in sin did my mother conceive me." Like our mothers and fathers, David’s mother was a sinner. Our moms inherited this sinful nature from their parents, and they from theirs, and so on throughout the genealogical line all the way back to Adam and Eve. Of course, this disposition was introduced to us through the most powerful thing that God has ever created, the devil himself. He wasn't created as such, no, God created him righteous and he distorted God's plans for himself.
As we have pointed out in our previous studies, this changing of the human heart from hardheartedness toward God to submission to Him is a process. This process leads us to being broken of our waywardness with reference to God. This brokenness renders a true happy joy despite our circumstances. The Lord Jesus used the word "blessed" to describe the inward, happy, joyful, and contented state of those who are in and being defined by God's definition of things.
Today's verse reads, "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness."
The verbs "hunger" and "thirst" are present participles meaning "craving and longing." These words describe those who truly desire something more than what this world has to offer. It is a longing for what is right in a situation where it is obviously lacking. We find ourselves in the realm where the evil one rules and there is therefore wickedness all around. We find ourselves in a place where righteousness is not practiced. We are like those in a desert who desperately search for food and water but our search is for that which is far more substantive than the temporal.
When we face hunger, it can be quelled temporarily with a few morsels. But when that is lacking, there is nothing to take away the agony found in the human body. The Lord Jesus combined hungering and thirsting with a fervent intensity to reveal how desperate our situation truly is. This is why He preceded today's beatitude with poverty of spirit and mourning which leads to surrendering control to God. So, the Lord Jesus compared our real need for righteousness with our felt needs of hungering and thirsting.
The Lord Jesus was fully informed having come out of forty days and forty nights where He was deprived of the needs of His human body. He was famished for food and drink, however, despite this, He craved something far more substantive. Our longings in this world whatever they may be are mere echoes of our longing for God and His righteousness. While our physical life depends on food and water, our spiritual life depends on God and His righteousness.
As indicated in the remainder of today's verse, the result of such a pursuit is fulfillment or satisfaction. The word translated "filled" is a word that actually means the satisfying grazing of an animal. The Lord Jesus says that as a cow dines in an open field, so those who learn to be fed by God are satisfied with His continuous supply of righteousness. And, we can only truly hunger and thirst after these things when we have gained faith that God not only exists but that He is good. The beatitudes describe the process whereby we are led by God to the open terrain of His definition of things are He intended them to be.
Those who are not preview to this process that leads us to the Lord Jesus Himself hunger but they hunger and thirst for the physical. They can't see beyond the material and temporal. They have a hunger and a thirst for happiness and fulfillment, but they look for it in the wrong place. Every human heart was created by God with a hunger for Him. The problem is we live in a world which has stunted that hunger. The man or woman who has not entered into a relationship with God tries to satisfy their longings in the lesser things of this world. How many times have we all experienced something that we thought would totally fulfill us only to discover that it didn't deliver as we expected?
The Lord Jesus, on the other hand, offers something different. He offers us Himself as the living water. In Jeremiah 2:13 we read, "They have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and have hewed them out broken cisterns that can hold no water." In other words, God has made man with a thirst and a hunger for Him, but man refuses the well of living water and makes himself broken wells that can’t even hold water. Even believers hunger and thirst for happiness and meaning and fulfillment and inevitably try to fill themselves up with self-indulgent pleasures, possessions, power, and the praise this world offers but to no avail.
The prodigal son is a great example of this. He longed for the pleasures of this world and the world didn't deliver as he thought it would. In fact, when he returned home broken he realized satisfaction was only found at home with his father. He longed to possess, he longed for the popularity of a party life, but he went hungry in his soul and finally he had the sense to come to himself and say, "How many of my father’s servants have bread enough and to spare?" It was at that point that the prodigal went back to his father’s house and was given a feast.
The feast that the prodigal arrived home for pictures for us that which God created us for in the first place. The world, in its distracted living, tries to satisfy itself with the husks of the swine and it comes up absolutely empty every time. We have all been there, and those who respond to the leading of the Spirit of God come running back to Him only to discover a feast that satisfies the longings of his hungry and thirsty soul. Our hunger and thirst is actually for the One who created us, the Lord Jesus Himself. It is His righteousness that satisfies our hollowed out souls. This is what prompted the words of Blaise Paschal who said, "God has created us with a god-shaped vacuum which only God can fill."
