The Day Happiness and Mourning Kissed Each Other
“Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted” (Matthew 5:4).
Mourning is hateful and irksome to poor human nature. From suffering and sadness our spirits instinctively shrink. By nature we seek the society of the cheerful and joyous. Our text presents an anomaly to the unregenerate, yet it is sweet music to the ears of God’s elect.
If “blessed,” why do they “mourn”? If they “mourn,” how can they be “blessed”? Only the child of God has the key to this paradox. The more we ponder our text the more we are constrained to exclaim, “Never man spoke like this Man!” “Blessed [happy] are they that mourn is an aphorism that is at complete variance with the world’s logic. Men have in all places and in all ages regarded the prosperous and gay as the happy ones, but Christ pronounces happy those who are poor in spirit and who mourn.
Now it is obvious that it is not every species of mourning that is here referred to. There is a “sorrow of the world [that] worketh death” ( Corinthians 7:10). The mourning for which Christ promises comfort must be restricted to that which is spiritual. The mourning that is blessed is the result of a realization of God’s holiness and goodness that issues in a sense of the depravity of our natures and the enormous guilt of our conduct. The mourning for which Christ promises Divine comfort is a sorrowing over our sins with a godly sorrow.
The eight Beatitudes are arranged in four pairs. Proof of this will be furnished as we proceed. The first of the series is the blessing that Christ pronounced upon those who are poor in spirit, which we took as a description of those who have been awakened to a sense of their own nothingness and emptiness. Now the transition from such poverty to mourning is easy to follow. In fact, mourning follows so closely that it is in reality poverty’s companion.
The mourning that is here referred to is manifestly more than that of bereavement, affliction, or loss. It is mourning for sin.
It is mourning over the felt destitution of our spiritual state, and over the iniquities that have separated us and God; mourning over the very morality in which we have boasted, and the self- righteousness in which we have trusted; sorrow for rebellion against God, and hostility to His will; and such mourning always goes side by side with conscious poverty of spirit (Dr. Pierson).
About the Author
This article is presented by Pablo Perez and Spiritual Fuel. The words of the article were written by A.W. Pink (One of the most influential evangelical authors in the second half of the twentieth century). You can read more articles on Spiritual Fuel - a Free Devotional Newsletter. Click here: http://spiritualfuel.org
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