Being Pure In Heart

Purity.  

It's a quality that we desire when something when we are looking at something of value.  If a piece of jewelry says "pure gold," and we paid serious money for it, and come to find out it's mixed with lead (which mimics the weight of gold, because it's almost as dense) we will feel deceived.

It's a quality that we desire if we are consuming something.  If the bread says, "100% whole wheat" and we find it has white flour in it, we feel that we paid for something we did not get.  If it says, "gluten free" and has wheat flour in it, I personally will get sick and if someone has celiac disease, they could end up in the hospital.

We want the label, "pure," to be accurate as consumers. Governments passed all sorts of laws in the last few centuries to ensure that labels matched the contents. 

But if you look up the word, "pure," in Strong's Concordance, you find it applied to the furniture and religious items that God commanded to be made by His hand-picked craftsmen in Exodus 31.  Then you see an immediate counterfeit of that in Exodus 32, where gold is used to craft an idol: the golden calf. 

The world always counterfeits the things of God.  Satan counterfeited true wisdom by insinuating to Eve that God was holding out on her, so she needed to grab the apple and get "real" wisdom.  Satan will take the gold of God--His love, wisdom, provision, and instruction--and add impurities to it (sin, pride, arrogance, deception) and try to pass it off to us as real. 

We may not discover how impure Satan's counterfeits are until the consequences come at us--for Adam and Eve it was expulsion from the Garden into a world where the first act outside of it was the murder of one son by the other son.

Once again, Jesus is distilling the Kingdom of God's charter with what we call the Beatitudes, or what someone once called, the "beautiful attitudes."  This one is Matthew 5:8:

"Blessed are the pure in heart,
for they will see God."

According to Strong's, the word "pure" here carries with it an ethical component: 

• Free from corrupt desire, from sin and guilt
• Free from every admixture of what is false, sincere genuine
• Blameless, innocent
• Unstained with the guilt of anything [1]

Wow. That is a tall order, isn't it?  But, stop for a moment and consider what kind of person would you trust: Someone who has no hidden motives, is genuine, isn't filled with deceit and has made amends for any wrongs they did. 

But if Jesus is outlining a new way of living, and you would like to be a card-carrying member of this new Kingdom, aren't those the kind of people you would like to be around?  Those around you would feel the same way.

Think about it:  The Kingdom of God is a reversal of what happened to this planet after the Fall.  It's a kind of restoration of how we were created to be and then lost because of Adam's disobedience. It's a reversal of sin's devastation: corruption, lies, debauchery and a marred conscience.  

Do you remember how Adam and Eve intimately fellowshipped with God in the Garden?  We learn of God's intimate presence after it had been disrupted by Adam's disobedience: 

"Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man, 'Where are you?'" (Gen. 3: 8-9)

I think the saddest words God ever uttered were these: "Where are you?" God knew where Adam was; He knew that shame had swept Adam into the shadows, away from Him, away from the friendship that they both enjoyed and away from Him because of the stench of sin. 

But Adam had seen God.

So will the pure of heart. David gives us a beautiful prayer to utter as we seek God: 

Have mercy on me, O God,
according to your unfailing love;
according to your great compassion
blot out my transgressions.
Wash away all my iniquity
and cleanse me from my sin.

For I know my transgressions,
and my sin is always before me.
Against you, you only, have I sinned
and done what is evil in your sight;
so you are right in your verdict
and justified when you judge.

Surely I was sinful at birth,
sinful from the time my mother conceived me.
Yet you desired faithfulness even in the womb;
you taught me wisdom in that secret place.

Cleanse me with hyssop, and I will be clean;
wash me, and I will be whiter than snow.
Let me hear joy and gladness;
let the bones you have crushed rejoice.
Hide your face from my sins
and blot out all my iniquity.

Create in me a pure heart, O God,
and renew a steadfast spirit within me.
Do not cast me from your presence
or take your Holy Spirit from me.
Restore to me the joy of your salvation
and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me...

My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit;
a broken and contrite heart
you, God, will not despise.  (Psalm 51:1-12 & 17)

This psalm was written after David committed adultery with Bathsheba.  So, David was not on the "Oh, I have overcome this!" side of this!  But this psalm is a reminder of how God can cleanse, renew and transform a heart.  Even if that heart fails time and time again. 

What is then for us to do?  

We must want it.  Pure (pun intended) and simple.  

The Kingdom of God is about realigning our priorities and how we view things.  Do we use our flesh to evaluate the world?  Or do we seek the Kingdom of God above all else?  We must ask God to do what only He can do: conform us to the image of His Son.  Paul says, 

For God knew his people in advance, and he chose them to become like his Son, so that his Son would be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. And having chosen them, he called them to come to him. And having called them, he gave them right standing with himself. And having given them right standing, he gave them his glory. (Romans 8:29-30)

God wants nothing more than to walk in the garden with us again, fellowshipping and enjoying His company.  Paul tells of the beauty of encountering God, with a heart that is open to all He would show us:  

But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord. (2 Cor. 3:18)

Amen. 

[1] https://www.blueletterbible.org/lexicon/g2513/kjv/tr/0-1/