If our conception of Him is such that He can be admired and applauded by the non-Christian, we have a wrong view of Him. The effect of Jesus Christ upon His contemporaries was that many threw stones at Him. They hated Him; and finally, choosing a murderer instead of Him, they put Him to death. This is the effect Jesus Christ always has upon the world. But you see there are other ideas about Him. There are worldly people who tell us they admire Jesus Christ, but that is because they have never seen Him. If they saw Him, they would hate Him as His contemporaries did. He does not change; man does not change. So let us be careful that our ideas about Christ are such that the natural man cannot easily admire or applaud. That leads to the second conclusion. This Beatitude tests our ideas as to what the Christian is. The Christian is like his Lord, and this is what our Lord said about him. `Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you ! for so did their fathers to the false prophets' (Lk. Vi. 26). And yet is not our idea of what we call the perfect Christian nearly always that he is a nice, popular man who never offends anybody, and is so easy to get on with? But if this Beatitude is true, that is not the real Christian, because the real Christian is a man who is not praised by everybody. They did not praise our Lord, and they will never praise the man who is like Him. `Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you!' That is what they did to the false prophets; they did not do that to Christ Himself. So I draw my next deduction. It concerns the natural, unregenerate man, and it is this. The natural mind, as Paul says, `is enmity against God'. Though he talks about God, he really hates God. And when the Son of God came on earth he hated and crucified Him. And that is the attitude of the world towards Him now.*Soli Deo Gloria!
*Martyn Lloyd-Jones. Studies in the Sermon on the Mount (Kindle Locations 1986-1998). Kindle Edition.
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