Beckett: Blessed Are Those Who Hunger & Thirst for Righteousness

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled” (Matthew 5:6; my translation).

After becoming poor in spirit and recognising you have nothing to offer God (v. 3), mourning over the world’s brokenness as well as your own (v. 4), and realising how lowly you are (v. 5), the inevitable result is to hunger and thirst for God’s righteousness—His justice, for Him to put things right. We yell about this all the time, don’t we? “Why doesn’t God just do something about evil already?” He already has. He put His only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ, on the cross to suffer the justice you and I deserve. Jesus suffered God’s justice so that you and I don’t have to. He therefore credits His righteousness to you and me because He took upon Himself our sins on the cross.

Still, though, “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known” (1 Corinthians 13:12). We receive Christ’s righteousness now both by faith and in the Lord’s Supper, though only dimly through the mirror of the cross—we see ourselves in Christ on the cross, dead to sin. Yet a time will come when we see Him face to face, risen and ascended in all His glory, to receive His righteousness in full. Right now, we receive His righteousness, though it appears partial on this side of the eschaton; but on the other side when He returns in glory, we will be filled with His righteousness, our cups overflowing.

That is why we are blessed when we hunger and thirst for His righteousness, for this hunger will not last forever. He is coming to judge the living and the dead, to bring His saints unto life everlasting. His righteousness will fill all the Earth, and our very own souls and bodies when He raises us from the dead for all eternity.