R.C. Sproul

his mouth.

But this again is kind of an alerting flag that the Hebrew person understood that when it was said of a teacher or of a rabbi or of a prophet that he opened his mouth, that was the signal to get ready because what you were about to hear was a word from God.

And so Matthew tells us that Jesus opened his mouth and began to teach them.

And the first of the Beatitudes is this.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God.

In the first instance, we have to see that this Beatitude is

clearly qualified by Matthew, where when Luke speaks of various beatitudes, he doesn't have the qualifier.

He simply says, blessed are the poor.

And some have drawn from this the idea that the kingdom of God belongs essentially to poor people, and that really all one has to do to enter the kingdom of God is

is to be poor in the material sense.

And there arose in the Middle Ages a form of mysticism which was called poverty mysticism, where poverty itself was elevated to a level of virtue that gave merit to those who were in such a state.

That idea ignores the teaching of the Bible in a broader sense on poverty.

In the Old Testament, for example, the Old Testament Scriptures distinguish among four different types of poor people.

The first are those who are poor as a result of their sloth.

They are poor because they're too lazy to sow their seed or be engaged in meaningful and productive industry, and this group of the poor comes sharply under the judgment of God.

I mention that because that indicates that biblically there's no inherent virtue associated with poverty.

The second group that is designated as the poor are those who are poor as a result of calamity through no fault of their own.

They're not poor simply because they're lazy.

They're poor because the farmer experienced a drought.

or some storm that destroyed his crops, or a person had a serious accident that left them in such a crippled fashion that they were not able to be engaged in productive labor.