Blessed Are the Pure in Heart
This is the sixth message in a series on the Beatitudes, and it brings us to what may be the most solemn, heart-searching verse in all of Scripture: “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.” Solemn and searching — but, praise God, blessed. The more this verse is examined, the more it drives home a truth that leaves no room for carnal profession. It puts the last nail in the coffin of a merely nominal Christianity and buries it. It does away with everything of the flesh and brings a man face to face with the living God: without a pure heart, he shall not see God; but with a pure heart, he shall.
This verse stands beside another: “Follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord” (Hebrews 12:14). To rightly divide it, and to understand what is actually being said, requires seeing that the word translated “pure” in the New Testament carries two distinct meanings in the Greek — and both are at work here.
Two Words for “Pure”
The first Greek word for “pure” means holy — pure from all defilement, pure from all contamination, spoken properly only of God and of what God is. This is the word used in 1 John 3:2–3: “Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is. And every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as he is pure.” It is likewise the word behind Philippians 4:8, where believers are told to think on “whatsoever things are pure” — that is, whatsoever is holy, without contamination. When the mind dwells on God, it dwells on His purity and His holiness in this sense.
But the word in this text carries the other meaning of “pure” — it means to cleanse. The pure in heart of Matthew 5:8 are those cleansed by the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. “Now the end of the commandment is charity out of a pure heart” (1 Timothy 1:5); “Holding the mystery of the faith in a pure conscience” (1 Timothy 3:9) — a cleansed conscience, as Hebrews 9:13–14 makes plain: “For if the blood of bulls and of goats, and the ashes of an heifer sprinkling the unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh: how much more shall the blood of Christ… purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?” It is the same usage found in David’s cry, “Create in me a clean heart, O God” (Psalm 51:10) — a heart cleansed by the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Positional Holiness, Progressive Sanctification
These two words correspond to two things God does for His people. The first word, meaning holy, corresponds to positional sanctification — what God makes a man to be, in Christ, the moment He saves him. God makes the believer like Himself in standing before Him. The second word, the one in this text, carries the sense of a sanctification that is progressive — carried on continually in the believer’s heart by the grace of God across the whole of his life.
Because of this positional standing, believers are called saints, holy ones, sanctified ones — not because of anything they have done, but because God, in mercy and grace, has saved them and planted His own nature within them, giving a new heart that seeks after Him. The believer sits before God holy, righteous, without blame, unreprovable in His sight, even while walking here below with feet still soiled by the world, waiting for the coming of the Lord. Yet there is no man, woman, or young believer in this life who can say he exercises, continuously, a heart holy in thought, word, and deed even now. That teaching — a sinless perfection obtainable in this life, where the very thought of sin no longer arises — is not found in God’s Word. “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). What God has given, in salvation, is a heart cleansed and made new — and this text opens up what that pure heart actually is and does.
A Heart That Cannot Cleanse Itself
How, then, can a man with a heart like that ever be said to have a pure heart, a cleansed heart? The answer goes back to the very purpose of Calvary, to the shed blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, to God’s great mercy in sending the Holy Spirit. Any man who thinks he can give himself a pure heart does not know what he is talking about. Any man who imagines he can pick himself up by his own bootstraps and improve his own heart does not know what he is talking about. This overflow of evil out of the natural heart can be stopped only by the grace of God — it is the work of the Spirit of God, who regenerates, who gives a new heart and a new spirit, who brings a sinner to his wit’s end so that he throws up his hands, cries for mercy, and looks by faith to the Lord Jesus Christ — who alone can deliver him from the pit, and who alone can give him a new heart.
There is no more helpless feeling than knowing that a man cannot give himself a new heart. He is wholly and completely dependent on God for it — on the promise, “A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you…” (Ezekiel 36:26), coupled with the truth that “God, that cannot lie, promised” (Titus 1:2). Only the living God can take away the heart of stone. This is why salvation is a matter of such vastly greater consequence than merely walking down an aisle, shaking a preacher’s hand, or repeating a prayer. It is a dramatic change — a change of masters, a change of worlds. Before, a man could not see God; now he sees Him, and loves Him. Before, he had no use for Him; now his heart goes out to Him. This is nothing less than regeneration, the new birth: not a patching-up of the old man, but a new man coming in. “Old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.”
The Pure Heart’s Undivided Love
To be pure in heart is to be like the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, who did no sin, neither was guile found in His mouth. It means an undivided love which regards God as the highest good, and is concerned above all with loving Him and receiving His love. It is to keep the first great commandment — to love the Lord God with all the heart, soul, mind, and strength. Before God saved a man, there was, as Scripture says, “no beauty that we should desire him” — but now the believer cannot live without Him, and seeks after Him continually. The pure heart’s one supreme desire, in every part of life, is to please Him and to walk with Him — to be like Him.
This is a heart made single rather than divided, no longer looking two ways at once but with a single eye fixed on Christ. David’s prayer belongs here: “Unite my heart to fear thy name” (Psalm 86:11) — take away every remaining trace of hypocrisy, and make the heart’s desire for God real.
Still at War: The Whole Armor of God
None of this means the pure-hearted man has stopped feeling the pull of the old nature. He is very much aware of how much of it remains, and battles it daily. This is precisely why God has given the whole armor described in Ephesians 6 — the loins girded with truth, the feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace, the helmet of salvation, the shield of faith to quench the fiery darts of the wicked one, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God, to answer the enemy as Christ did: “Get thee behind me, Satan.” The pure heart is one that keeps a pure object continually before it — Christ Himself, “holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, and made higher than the heavens” — and, seeing Him by faith, is drawn to be like Him.
The pure heart also fears the Lord — not a slavish fear, but a fear of sinning against Him, of grieving Him, of bringing reproach on His holy name. Having been given a hatred for sin it once loved, and a love for what it once hated, the purer the heart becomes, the more conscious it grows of its own remaining corruption. It takes notice of every foul thought, every vile imagination, every evil desire — and runs with it to Christ, “casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:4–5). It mourns over pride, over discontent, over murmuring, over unbelief, over affections grown cold — and runs to Him with all of it. That running to Christ, not a false claim to sinlessness, is itself the mark of a cleansed heart.
Marks of a Pure Heart
A pure heart abstains from the acts of uncleanness that others make light of, not merely from fear of being found out, but from a dread of displeasing a holy God. It reckons the body a member of Christ Himself, and therefore a temple not to be given over to sin. It pursues holiness as Titus 2:11–12 describes: “For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world.” It takes seriously the warning of Proverbs 5:14 — “I was almost in all evil in the midst of the congregation and assembly” — a reminder that a man may sit among the very people of God and still be nearly overtaken by evil, and that only the grace of God can hold anyone, anywhere.
A pure heart also avoids the occasions of evil rather than presuming upon its own strength, making, as Job did, “a covenant with mine eyes” (Job 31:1) rather than gazing on what it knows will lead to sin. None of this is accomplished by human effort alone; it is the Spirit of Christ within the believer, given for exactly this purpose — to break the power of sin and to point out what is wrong — that holds a man steady even in surroundings, at work or elsewhere, where no one else around him has any concern for holiness at all.
Because We Shall See Him
What ultimately motivates all of this is the plain promise of the text itself: the pure in heart shall see God. Hebrews 11:24–27 says of Moses that he forsook Egypt, “not fearing the wrath of the king: for he endured, as seeing him who is invisible.” That is the same motive at work here — to endure, because the eye of faith already sees Him who is invisible, and one day will see Him openly, as Job said: “I know that my redeemer liveth… whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another” (Job 19:25,27). Is there anything in this life more precious than fellowship with the living God, both now by faith and forever in glory? That hope is what makes a believer willing to let go of the world — not because holiness is a means of earning a standing already given in Christ, but because the one who is going to see God wants, even now, thoughts and words that are holy, and keeps short accounts with Him, confessing quickly rather than letting sin lie unconfessed.
At the Lord’s Table
This message closed, as it was originally preached, at the Lord’s Table. The hope of the pure in heart lies nowhere but in the blood of Christ — coming to that blood again and again by faith, that the conscience may be made clean, that the heart may be made new. “The blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin” (1 John 1:7). At the table, the believer remembers that Christ died in his place, that He was made sin for those who knew no sin, that they in turn might be made the righteousness of God in Him (2 Corinthians 5:21) — that “when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly” (Romans 5:6). It is loving-kindness and tender mercy that drew such a people out of the miry clay and set their feet upon a rock (Psalm 40:2–3), and it is that same grace, ministered continually by the Holy Spirit, that gives and keeps a pure heart — a heart that shall, at the last, see God.