The Sermon on the Mount: Section 42, B--Blessed are the pure in heart.

Section 42

THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT
(A Mountain Plateau not far from Capernaum) 
Subdivision B
BEATITUDES: PROMISES TO MESSIAH'S SUBJECTS

MATT. 5:3-12
LUKE 6:20-26

Mat 5:8  Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

Psa 15:2  He who walks blamelessly and does what is right and speaks truth in his heart.

Sin befogs and beclouds the heart so that one cannot see God. Purity has here its widest sense and includes everything. -RWP

This beatitude is the most difficult for me to enter into.  Pureness of heart--what does that mean exactly?  Even the commentators seem spartan with comments.  Jon Courson makes an analogy to soap---that one can be "clean" with any soap, but that Ivory soap is different in that it is "pure."

John Piper's 1986 ruminations on purity of heart helped me more than other commentaries.  His connects the definition of purity back to David's psalms:

"Let me try to show you where that definition comes from in Scripture. We start with the closest OT parallel to this beatitude, namely, Psalm 24:3–4.

Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord?And who shall stand in his holy place?  He who has clean hands and a pure heart,who does not lift up his soul to what is false,and does not swear deceitfully.

You can see what David means by a "pure heart" in the phrases that follow it. A pure heart is a heart that has nothing to do with falsehood. It is painstakingly truthful and free from deceitfulness. Deceit is what you do when you will two things, not one thing. You will to do one thing and you will that people think you are doing another. You will to feel one thing and you will that people think you are feeling another. That is impurity of heart. Purity of heart is to will one thing, namely, to "seek the face of the Lord" (verse 6).My own conviction is that the fundamental problem in American society and culture is that we attempt to solve human problems while neglecting the centrality of God in the life of the soul.We are so bombarded by human tragedies of poverty and crime and abuse and neglect and war and the manifold injustices of man to man, that we are tempted to agree with the world that it is useless pie in the sky by and by to be concerned with whether the soul will ever see God. But this is the greatest of all tragedies—that in seeking to relieve the temporal miseries of man we set aside the centrality of God. But Jesus comes to us this morning and says, "Blessed are the pure in heart," not first because they change society, but first because they will see God. Seeing God is the great goal of being pure. Abandon that goal and human culture collapses into ruin. -"Blessed Are the Pure in Heart," John Piper