One of my favorite sections of Scripture is the Sermon on the Mount, from Matthew 5, 6 and 7. Some of Jesus’ best known teachings come from these three chapters. And many of the topics he speaks of in these verses have become very familiar to us.
Too familiar, maybe.
From turning the other cheek to being a city on a hill. From treasures in heaven to judgment. From divorce, murder, and adultery to giving, worry and fasting. There are the wise and foolish builders, the narrow and wide gates, and the passage telling us to ask, seek, knock. And then there are the Beatitudes.
While most of these passages are straight forward and can be taken at face value, the Beatitudes seem to stump us. The Beatitudes seem vague and general. Are they a stair-step progression of what a Christian should be? Or are they deeper than that? Or, perhaps, is it much more simple than that?
These are some of the questions that have always bothered me as I read these short verses. I’ve landed on the general belief that they are a progression that we go through as Christians as we grow, but even so, that understanding seems to leave something behind. It doesn’t quite explain this passage of Jesus’ words satisfactorily.
Until now. Until I read Crucifying Morality, by R. W. Glenn.
Because of my love for the rest of these chapters, and when I saw that this book might help explain the purpose of the first section, I had to read it.
And I’m glad I did.
Crucifying Morality is a deep examination of the Beatitudes, looking at them in a totally new light. These eight statements aren’t steps to follow, or phases we go through. They are, quite simply, the Gospel in a nutshell. Jesus makes these eight declarations and stuns us when we actually get a good look at what he’s saying, and not what we think he’s saying.
Too often, we try to do our own thing. Even in the realm of our faith, we tend to think that if we just do more, or do it better, we can somehow please God and take a step closer to salvation.
But Jesus makes it clear: nothing we can do will get us there. He had to do what needed to be done; he had to crucify our morality, so that we could depend upon his grace to do what we could never do on our own.
A few years ago, a friend gave me a copy of After The Flood, by Bill Cooper. I was fascinated, and read through the entire book, appendices and all, in a couple of evenings. It was full of research and details about what happened just after Noah’s Flood, and how mankind was forced to spread out across the face of the earth after God’s actions at the Tower of Babel.
