Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 3158
“Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.” Matthew 5:7.
[In the year 1873, Mr. Spurgeon delivered what he called “a series of sententious homilies” on the Beatitudes. After an introductory discourse upon the Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes as a whole, he intended to preach upon each one separately, but either illness or some other special reason prevented him from fully carrying out this purpose. There are, however, seven Sermons upon the Beatitudes which have already been published—See Sermons #422, Volume 7— THE PEACEMAKER; #2103, Volume 35—THE HUNGER AND THIRST WHICH ARE BLESSED; #3155, Volume 55—THE BEATITUDES; #3156, Volume 55—THE FIRST BEATITUDE and #3065, Volume 53—THE THIRD BEATITUDE; #3157, Volume 55— THE FOURTH BEATITUDE—and this one.]
I MUST take for granted the fact that you have heard the previous discourses upon the Beatitudes. If you have not done so, I cannot now repeat all that I have said, but I may remind you that I have compared the Beatitudes to a ladder of light, and I have remarked that every one of them rises above and out of those which preceded it. So you will notice that the character mentioned here is higher than those which had been given before—higher than that of the man who is poor in spirit, or who mourns. Those things concern himself. He is yet feeble and out of that weakness grows meekness of spirit which makes him endure wrongs from others. But to be merciful is more than that, for the man now not merely endures wrongs, but he confers benefits. The Beatitude before this one concerns hungering and thirsting after righteousness, but here the man has got beyond mere righteousness—he has risen beyond the seeking of that which is right into the seeking of that which is good, kind, generous and the doing of kindly things towards his fellow man. The whole ladder rests upon Divine Grace, and Grace puts every stave into its place. And it is Grace which, in this place, has taught the man to be merciful, has blessed him and given him the promise that he shall obtain mercy. It would be wrong to take any one of these benedictions by itself and to say that every merciful man shall obtain mercy, or to misquote any other one in the same way, for that would be to wrest the Savior’s Words and to give them a meaning which He never intended them to convey. Reading these Beatitudes as a whole, we see that this mercifulness, of which I am about to speak, is a characteristic which has grown out of the rest—it has sprung from all the previous works of Grace. And the man is not merely merciful in the human sense—with a humanity which ought to be common to all mankind—but he is merciful in a higher and better sense with a mercy which only the Spirit of God can ever teach to the soul of man!
Having noticed the rising of this Beatitude above the rest, we will now come to look at it more closely. It is necessary that we should be very guarded while speaking upon it and in order to be so, we will ask, first, who are these blessed people Secondly, what is their peculiar virtue And thirdly, what is their special blessingg
I. Who Are These Blessed People—the Merciful that Obtain Mercy?
You remember that at the commencement of our homilies upon this Sermon on the Mount, we noticed that our Lord’s subject was not how we are to be saved, but who are saved. He is not here describing the way of salvation at all. That He does in many other places, but He here gives us the signs and evidences of the work of Grace in the soul. We would greatly err if we should say that we must be merciful in order to obtain mercy and that we must only hope to get the mercy of God through first of all being merciful ourselves. Now, in order to put aside any such legal notion—which would be clean contrary to the entire current of Scripture and directly opposed to the fundamental Doctrine of Justification by Faith in Christ—I ask you to notice that these persons are already blessed and have obtained mercy! Long before they became merciful, God was merciful to them. And before the full promise was given them, as in our text, that they
should obtain yet further mercy, they had already obtained the great mercy of a renewed heart which had made them merciful! That is clear from the context of the text.
For, first, they were poor in spirit, and it is no mean mercy to be emptied of our pride, to be brought to see how undeserving we are in the sight of God and to be made to feel our personal weakness and need of everything that might make us fit for the Presence of God! I could ask for some men whom I know no greater mercy than that they might be blessed with spiritual poverty—that they might be made to feel how poor they are—for they will never know Christ and they will never rise to be practically merciful till first they have seen their own true condition and have obtained mercy enough to lie down at the foot of the Cross—and there, with a broken heart, to confess that they are empty and poor!