“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.” (Matthew 5:6)
Three weeks ago we looked at hunger and thirst as desires of the soul and how this reflects the true desires of the believing soul. Christ warns Christians about being lukewarm. Two weeks ago we looked at the object of the hunger and thirst. In Matthew 5:6 that object is righteousness. In the context of the Sermon on the Mount this righteousness is behavioral as acts of righteousness. Within the context of the Sermon on the Mount there is no mention of the righteousness of Christ given as a free gift and there are several references to acts of righteousness. So we concluded that the believer or the blessed person is one that hungers and thirsts after acts of righteousness. Last week we tried to show how it is that a person has no righteousness, no way to obtain righteousness for self, and yet it is perfectly consistent with hungering and thirsting after righteousness. This week I would like to show how the soul is satisfied and blessed in hungering and thirsting for righteousness.
In one very real sense the only true blessedness is that of God. For a human to be blessed, then, is for a human to share in the blessedness of God. There is no true joy except that which consists in true love and God alone is the source of true love. This is seen at least in part in John 15:10 where Christ tells us why He came: “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” Then in John 15:11 Christ tells us this: “These things I have spoken to you so that My joy may be in you, and that your joy may be made full.” When we see that “every good thing given and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights” (James 1:17), then we know that blessedness is from God and that alone is what can truly be the satisfaction of the soul that hungers and thirsts for righteousness.
Ephesians gives us another way of looking at the same issue. We hear many speak of wanting to be filled with the Holy Spirit and wanting more of Christ. Those are good things, but they can also be just words that reflect selfish hearts that desire to have God for sinful reasons. But Ephesians 3 gives us a real reason why we should want to be filled with the Spirit and to have more of Christ. Paul prayed “that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man, 17 so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, 18 may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, 19 and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God” (Eph 3:16-19). The things that are prior to being filled up to all the fullness of God are the things that lead to being filled to all the fullness of God. The true satisfaction of the soul is to be filled with God since nothing else will fill the soul but its Creator.
In looking at the passage in the paragraph above, we can see the progress of God in the soul. First we see that the inner man is strengthened with power through the Holy Spirit. The reason that the Spirit does this is so that Christ may dwell in hearts through faith. In other words, the soul that is not strengthened by the Spirit does not have the strength to contain Christ or be the dwelling place of Christ. The Spirit strengthens the inner man and Christ dwells in the heart through faith so that the soul may be rooted and grounded in love. A little later in this newsletter we will look at the connection between love and righteousness, but for the moment we can note that there is no righteousness apart from love. Therefore, another way to say that a soul hungers and thirsts for righteousness is to say that that soul has love and the desire to express that love. But in Ephesians 3 we see that it takes love in the soul to comprehend the immeasurable measurements of love. Human beings have to have love in order to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge. It is in the experiential knowledge of God (eternal life in John 17:3) that the soul is filled with the experiential knowledge of a love that it can never exhaust and so the soul is filled with the fullness of God. That is a description of a satisfied soul. It is a soul that is as full of God as it can be and yet desires more and more righteousness so that its capacity can be stretched to have more of God.
The soul that loves God can and will never be truly satisfied with anything or anyone other than God. The satisfaction of soul spoken of in Matthew 5 must be that of God filling the soul with Himself. It is the language of the soul spoken of in John and I John. It is the language of love. It is the soul being one with God and the love of God flowing in and through that soul. It is the language of the commandments which teach us to love God and our neighbor. It is the language of the soul in which the love of God abides in it and it abides in God. The language of righteousness is the language of love. For a soul that desires righteousness, only love will fill it.
To buttress the general statements in the preceding paragraph we can look at I Corinthians 13. “If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing” (vv 1-3). While we are still looking at hungering and thirsting after righteousness, the verses in this paragraph demonstrate that it is not possible to hunger after righteousness apart from love. Anything we do apart from love is sin and nothing but sin. So a person hungering and thirsting after righteousness is a person full of the love of God and striving to love and glorify God.
We can also see from I Corinthians 13:6 that love “does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth.” This is another argument from the opposite side of the issue. The one that loves seeks the glory of God and hungers and thirsts after righteousness. The one that does not love does not rejoice in unrighteousness. People are both hungering and thirsting after righteousness or are rejoicing in unrighteousness. This verse also tells us that love rejoices in the truth. In Scripture knowing truth is not just an intellectual awareness of a fact or proposition, but is a love for that truth followed by the outworking of that truth in life as well. The hungering and thirsting after righteousness is really the outworking of a love in the soul for the expression of that love in the world. Having that love of God in the soul and seeing that love expressed to the glory of God is the satisfaction of the soul.
A hunger and thirst after righteousness cannot be apart from the Greatest Commandments. In this sense, then, we can see that a hunger and thirst after righteousness is simply the appetite of the soul that loves Christ. The Greatest Commandment is to love God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength. The second Greatest Commandment is to love our neighbors as ourselves. There is no act (as also seen in I Cor 13:1-3) of righteousness that does not have love. But this can also be seen by this text: “By this the children of God and the children of the devil are obvious: anyone who does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor the one who does not love his brother. 11 For this is the message which you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another” (I John 3:10-11). Love for God always leads to love for others which is doing right according to and out of the love of God.
What is it that satisfies the hungry and thirsty soul? “I will fill the soul of the priests with abundance, And My people will be satisfied with My goodness,” declares the LORD” (Jer 31:14). “Because Your lovingkindness is better than life, My lips will praise You. 4 So I will bless You as long as I live; I will lift up my hands in Your name. 5 My soul is satisfied as with marrow and fatness, And my mouth offers praises with joyful lips” (Psa 63:3-5). “‘For I will pour out water on the thirsty land And streams on the dry ground; I will pour out My Spirit on your offspring And My blessing on your descendants” (Isa 44:3). “They drink their fill of the abundance of Your house; And You give them to drink of the river of Your delights. 9 For with You is the fountain of life; In Your light we see light” (Psa 36:8-9). Clearly, God alone fills and satisfies the soul.
A soul that hungers and thirsts for righteousness from love is a believing soul. “Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you will abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit” (Rom 15:13). God fills the believing soul with His own joy and peace. He fills the believing soul with hope by the power of the Spirit. The desires of the believing soul are to be set on things above (Col 3:1-4). The believing soul that is filled with the fullness of God (Eph 3:19) is the soul that desires nothing but God Himself. “Whom have I in heaven but You? And besides You, I desire nothing on earth. 26 My flesh and my heart may fail, But God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever” (Psa 73:25-26). The believing soul wants nothing more than to simply behold the beauty and glory of God. “One thing I have asked from the LORD, that I shall seek: That I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, To behold the beauty of the LORD And to meditate in His temple” (Psa 27:4).
Nothing satisfies the soul but God Himself so a hunger and thirst for righteousness must be as aspect of love for God. The pursuit of righteousness satisfies the soul in that the soul is filled with the presence of God instead of a hard heart that comes with sin. A righteous act such as prayer, when done out of love, is God communicating Himself to the soul and so the soul is filled with good and is satisfied with being filled with God. We are to taste and see that the Lord is good. In doing these things the soul is filled with God and as such is satisfied. That is a blessed satisfaction and the believing soul will settle for nothing less.
God Loves... Himself 
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