In the first 3 beatitudes, the Lord challenges us to put off self and sins and power. The result of the first 3 are seen in the fourth, a turning to the Lord in a desire for righteousness (Matthew 5:6). All around the world today, people are on a quest for happiness. The United States Declaration of Independence states, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” We want to be happy! The founding fathers recognized the basic right of pursuing happiness, but they could not guarantee having it. That is bigger than a government can grant. The problem with this pursuit is that happiness does not come when we pursue it; it comes in the pursuit of bigger and loftier things. We are never commanded to hunger and thirst after happiness or blessedness or experience. Setting our focus on these things is about like the riches described in Proverbs 23:5. If you set your eyes on riches, they tend to sprout wings and flutter away. That is about what it is like to pursue happiness. It is about like grabbing a handful of water. The harder you grab, the more it squirts out. This beatitude is a test of the sincerity of our profession. Do we hunger and thirst after righteousness? Here we see that true happiness, blessedness, comes in the pursuit of righteousness.
Fundamentally, the believer has come to recognize that the righteousness that God requires is a righteousness that we cannot produce. That is the point of the first 3 beatitudes- turning away from self-righteousness. I am hopeless in myself, but I want to be right with God. 1 Corinthians 1:30 says that Christ has been made unto us righteousness. The righteousness that God requires is the righteousness that He provides. But the verse goes on to say that Christ has also been made unto us sanctification. This is the believer’s experience of growing to be more like Jesus every day by the work of the Holy Spirit. Every believer is a work in progress by God’s grace. Hungering and thirsting after righteousness signifies a deep desire that must be satisfied, not a passing hankering. We are not going to be spending our energies on convincing ourselves that we have come a long way and that we should be satisfied. The Bible is full of verses that instruct the believer to, on the basis of the work of God in them, press on to be closer to Him.
The result is that those who hunger and thirst after righteousness will be filled. The Christian life is not a life of emptiness but of satisfaction in Christ.
