R.C. Sproul

I've tried to take opportunities to explain the meaning of that term blessed as we find it in the Scriptures.

Some modern translators looking at the Beatitudes, and you may have it in your version of the Bible, they read like this.

Instead of blessed are the poor in spirit, it simply says blessed

happy are the poor in spirit.

I'm very dissatisfied with that translation because the very word happy has been cheapened, I think, in our contemporary culture, and it fails to include a depth dimension that is intensely spiritual that is not found in the English word

happy.

To be sure, happiness is an element of blessedness, but by no means exhausts it.

Also, in the past, I've mentioned that the prophets of the Old Testament and Jesus, who is also a prophet in the New Testament,

all use a particular literary form of address.

The Bible says in the Old Testament prophets that when the prophet would make an announcement, it would be the word of the Lord, because God put His words in the mouth of His prophets.

And the prophets would give announcements

doom, and also announcements of prosperity, or we call them oracles of woe or oracles of weal.

These oracles are divine pronouncements like the Greeks believed they would get from the oracle of Delphi, who would deliver a supernatural pronouncement.

But the Hebrew prophets used this structure of the oracle to announce the Word of God.

The oracle of doom was introduced by the word woe.

Woe.

Unto you, Syria.

Woe unto you, Damascus, as Amos thundered.

And also Jesus uses that same literary form when he warns the Pharisees of their impending judgment.

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites.