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As the world watches Iran, Christians look on with another set of eyes.

Wherever we reside, we watch and pray with a spiritual vision that transcends natural concerns and our own nation-state. We are Americans, Brazilians, Canadians, Dominicans, Emiratis, yet in Christ, we are now most fundamentally citizens of heaven (Philippians 3:20). Our supreme allegiance is to Jesus, risen, ascended, and reigning over all nations for the special good of his church — even in the great sorrows of these days.

Some estimate that in recent weeks the Muslim regime in Iran has killed more than thirty thousand protestors. As of today, the United States and Israel have executed six days of coordinated attacks on strategic targets in Iran. Over one thousand Iranians are reported dead, a number that includes soldiers, civilians, and the nation’s 86-year-old supreme leader, who had ruled since 1989. Iran has retaliated with drone and missile strikes across the region. So far, twelve Israelis and six Americans have died in the conflict.

How might Christians look on, and pray, in these tragic and potentially momentous days in Iran and the Middle East?

Persia and the People of God

“Iran” is the fairly recent name for the ancient civilization known as Persia, which plays an important role in our Scriptures. (The name Persia appears almost thirty times across five books in the Old Testament.) For the first-covenant people of God, Persia emerged as a liberator from their exile in Babylon. The Persian king Cyrus the Great issued the proclamation that freed the Jews to return home and rebuild the temple (2 Chronicles 36:22–23; Ezra 1:1–4). In his wake followed kings Darius, Xerxes, and Artaxerxes, who ruled over the post-exilic lives of Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther.

In a manner reminiscent of how God once stirred up the spirit of Cyrus, he has stirred the hearts of many Persians against the Muslim regime, especially in the last decade-plus. An annual gathering in late October at Cyrus’s tomb has grown to tens of thousands who rally to remember Persia’s pre-Islamic past. The Shiite Muslim regime came to power in 1979 following the nation’s frustration with its shah (king) and his oil-money personal excesses, friendships with the West, and modernizing efforts.

The history of twentieth-century Persia/Iran could go on at great length. But relevant to our immediate Christian interest is the widespread disillusionment with Islam, and especially so in Iran.

Disillusioned with Islam

The present conflict comes in the wake of a movement that’s been gaining steam for many years, and is part of a larger restlessness. Operation World reports that in Iran alone “50,000 mosques have closed in recent years as Iranians are disillusioned with both the regime and with Islam” and that “the younger generation is fed up with the legacy of oppression, bloodshed, cruel ‘justice,’ corruption, economic hardship, and cultural isolation from most of the world.”

According to Mindy Belz, the trend was undeniable even a decade ago: “An estimated two to seven million Muslims have converted to Christianity since the start of the twenty-first century. They occur in all parts of the Muslim world, including areas most hostile to Christianity, like Afghanistan and Iran. More than 80 percent of such movements began after 9/11.” In the last decade, the trend has continued, and accelerated, particularly in Iran.

Stunning Turn in Iran

Pastor Afshin Ziafat, a contributor to Desiring God who lived in Iran till age six, wrote for us in 2019:

As of 1979, there were about 500 known Christians from a Muslim background in Iran. In 2005, it was estimated that there were 40,000 ethnic Iranian Christians (not including ethnic minority Christians who live in Iran). That number grew to about 175,000 Christians in 2010. . . . Today, the average estimates of Christians within Iran range from 300,000 to upwards of one million, according to some missions experts. . . . More Iranians have become Christians in the last twenty years than in the previous 1,300 years, since Islam came to Iran.

That is a stunning turn — especially since it has happened while evangelism, conversion, and owning or distributing the Bible in Farsi has been illegal. According to Operation World, “Massive numbers of Iranians have come to Jesus in recent years! From only 500 Muslim-background believers in 1979, some estimates suggest the number is even greater than 1 million just in Iran alone. Large numbers of Persian people have also encountered the risen Christ outside of Iran.”

Ziafat updated his congregation briefly this past Sunday that present developments feel “very momentous”:

For 47 years, the people [of Iran] have been under the oppressive Islamic regime. . . . Some of the most hospitable, sweet, kind people — I mean this — that you will ever meet in life are Persians. And so, I really want to make sure you separate the government of Iran from the people of Iran in your mind. And the people of Iran have been tired of this Islamic regime. This could be a very momentous occasion if it leads to a regime change, [not just] for freedom’s sake, but also for the sake of the church. (For more, see Ziafat’s new video update.)

Rather than passing along prayer points, our team at Desiring God would like to offer this public prayer and invite you to join us as we intercede for Persia and the surrounding region.

Our Prayer for Persia

Father in heaven,

As this crisis unfolds, with its devastating sorrows and tremendous hopes, we who trust in your Son watch with the eyes of faith. Help us to see beyond what our fellow earthly citizens perceive with natural eyes: economics, world leaders, militaries, weapons. We want to see by your Spirit and ache for the unfolding of your good purposes to exalt your Son as the hero of all history and in every nation.

We pray for the many nations and world leaders now involved. May truth hold sway and true justice be done. Guard them from the fog and excesses of war, and bring a deeper and more lasting peace on the other side of this conflict. And may it be brief and not escalate unnecessarily. We ask for the protection of civilians and for minimal loss of life inside and outside Iran.

Father, for the Persian church, oh guard her in these days. Give grace to endure persecution and to out-rejoice opponents. May these terrifying times usher in a new era in which your church might come above ground and your people lead peaceful and quiet lives that are wildly fruitful in evangelism and the establishing of new churches (1 Timothy 2:1–4). May Persians who claim the name of Jesus emerge in surprising ways to shine as lights in the darkness.

Father, how remarkable it would be if the doors of one of the world’s most significant “closed countries” could swing open for Christian missionaries and teachers. Already, before now, the harvest has been great and the laborers few. May these critical days in Iran change this, that doors for your word would open (Colossians 4:3), and that trained Christian leaders could more freely train more leaders.

And Father, we know that the building and beautifying of Jesus’s church will happen with and through the spread of the gospel. So, we ask for even more conversions to Jesus. Keep these countless disillusioned Muslims from going to other broken cisterns like atheism and Zoroastrianism. Open their eyes and hearts to treasure Jesus and find true peace in him.

May the good news that Jesus saves sinners spread like never before in Persia, for youth disenchanted with Islam, for women who have struggled under its demeaning structures, for the aged who have been deceived or cried out for rescue for decades. We pray that Persian Christians, and all Christians, might declare the gospel of your Son clearly and boldly, as we ought to speak it (Ephesians 6:20; Colossians 4:4), that the word of Jesus “may speed ahead and be honored,” and that Persian believers, new and old, “may be delivered from wicked and evil men” (2 Thessalonians 3:1–2).

Father, as Paul anticipated that the prayers of fellow Christians, with the help of your Spirit, would “turn out for [his] deliverance” (Philippians 1:19), so we pray, expectant that you might use this prayer, offered by those who gladly bow before and treasure your Son, to work Christ-honoring wonders in Iran and beyond, both for the ending of these temporal sufferings, and for bringing decisive rescue from eternal suffering.

Make the great sorrows of Iran for these last fifty years, and in the present time, give way to millions discovering the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus our Lord (Philippians 3:8). We testify that the very heart of eternal life is to know you and your Son (John 17:3). May the spread of true life in Iran far outstrip the shedding of blood, to the glory of your Son in the newfound joy of countless souls in him.

In Jesus’s name we pray. Amen.

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Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. (Matthew 5:5)

How can a man be meek in an evil world?

Must he look upon injustice idly — or, worse, indifferently? How can he be gentle among the cruel, restrained among the ruthless? How can he live amongst wolves without becoming one? Whom does Jesus teach will “inherit the earth”?

Evil times befall the world when men misunderstand meekness. When a man sees the powerful exploit the vulnerable, the wealthy trample the poor, the defenseless being led to the slaughter, Impostor Meekness suggests we sign a peace treaty with tyrants. We do nothing about it. His bargain bans all resistance and whispers, “Gentle, only gentle,” but means, “Timid, only timid.” He sends a man scurrying from the front lines, reminding him with every step, The meek shall inherit the earth.

Or so I’ve imagined. I’ve struggled to reconcile meekness with strength, with backbone, with manhood.

Yet, strangely enough, the meekest men in the Bible were the most daring. Moses, for example, was the meekest man on earth (Numbers 12:3), yet God used him to punish a superpower, enforce the law, and confront idolatry — melting Israel’s golden calf and forcing the people to drink it. Great meekness did not always make him Mr. Rogers.

And this beatitude of meekness is authored by two of the manliest men in the Bible: the Lord Jesus citing King David. Christ quotes David in Psalm 37:11: “The meek shall inherit the land and delight themselves in abundant peace.” If we think meekness is a beta virtue for those indifferent to evil or too scared to stand up to it, Psalm 37 helps clarify how the meek think and believe in an evil world.

Masculine Meekness

David himself possessed a masculine meekness. When he didn’t retaliate, it wasn’t because he couldn’t retaliate. Some men appear meek because they can’t humble their enemies. But David is that dude; his reputation precedes him. He is known as “a man of valor, a man of war” before he ever fights the giant (1 Samuel 16:18). Meekness checked real might and managed anger that could have done something about it.

David wasn’t only meek. He fought. He confronted. He acted like a man. He could be meek precisely because he was dangerous. His meekness didn’t discharge his duty to be strong and courageous but discerned it. He knew when to fight and when not to; when to draw the sword and when to sheath it. He was tender with the flock and yet grabbed lions by their beards and slew them.

He was, as spoken of the Arthurian knight Lancelot, “the meekest man that ever ate in hall among ladies” and “the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest.” C.S. Lewis comments that such a hero “is not a compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth” (Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces, 717).

That is what I was missing. A man is free to be fully meek but must not be only meek. He welcomes children and shows compassion to the sinner, yet he knows when to pick up the whip and clear the temple. This man is a man not of nature, remarks Lewis, but of art — and we might say of grace.

Throughout Psalm 37, David calls for meekness:

Fret not yourself because of evildoers;
     be not envious of wrongdoers! (verse 1)

Trust in the Lord, and do good;
     dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness. (verse 3)

Delight yourself in the Lord. . . .
Commit your way to the Lord. . . .
Be still before the Lord. (verses 4–5, 7)

Refrain from anger, and forsake wrath! (verse 8)

Wait for the Lord and keep his way. (verse 34)

He trusts God instead of striking back. Yet if that is the only message we have for men in an evil world, we have abridged Psalm 37. David gives us more help to obey, to let righteousness restrain our hand. He hands us two promises that meekness grips instead of revenge.

1. The Promise of Hell

When we ask, “David, how could you control yourself when Shimei, Nabal, Saul, Absalom, and others injured you?” he doesn’t answer that men should always be gentle, but that God would always be just. “He will act.”

Read Psalm 37 again. Be still; trust God; don’t fret; be meek — why?

[Evildoers] will soon fade like the grass. (verse 2)

In just a little while, the wicked will be no more. (verse 10)

The Lord laughs at the wicked,
     for he sees that his day is coming. (verse 13)

Their sword shall enter their own heart,
     and their bows shall be broken. (verse 15)

Like smoke they vanish away. (verse 20)

Those cursed by him shall be cut off. . . .
The children of the wicked shall be cut off. . . .
You will look on when the wicked are cut off. (verses 22, 28, 34)

Transgressors shall be altogether destroyed. (verse 38)

The Lord loves justice. (verse 28)

David could leave the matter in the hands of the One whose indignation burned hotter than his own. The mighty hatred of God against the wicked allowed the sword of retaliation for personal grievances to slip from his hand.

Or, as Paul says, “Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it [give space] to the wrath of God, for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord’” (Romans 12:19). In other words, “Put your weapons away and move aside — to give space for my cannons.” The Lord’s promise to repay frees us to retaliate with food for a hungry enemy, drink for a thirsty persecutor. We overcome evil with good because he will overcome evil with wrath (Romans 12:19–20).

Do you trust his justice? Show me a man who does not believe in the vengeance of God, and I will show you a man who cannot be meek. How can he be? He will either numb himself to evil and blame virtue, or he will think religion but hollow sentiments and drench his hands in blood. Meekness depends upon divine justice and does not blush about hell.

2. The Promise of Heaven

Secondly, and captured beautifully in our beatitude, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5).

This promised land is given to soldiers that love peace. They are a beautiful paradox. They are soldiers — strong and courageous to confront evil — but also men who “repay no one evil for evil” and men who, “if possible, so far as it depends on [them], live peaceably with all” (Romans 12:17–18).

Throughout Psalm 37, God makes guarantees to those who trust him in their evil day.

[God] will bring forth your righteousness as the light,
     and your justice as the noonday. (verse 6)

The Lord upholds the righteous. (verse 17)

Their heritage will remain forever;
they are not put to shame in evil times. (verses 18–19)

Though [the righteous] fall, he shall not be cast headlong. (verse 24)

[God] will not forsake his saints.
They are preserved forever. (verse 28)

The Lord helps them and delivers them . . . and saves them. (verse 40)

In short, “The meek shall inherit the land and delight themselves in abundant peace” (verse 11).

God will not overlook any injustice, any insult, any corruption of the wicked. Trust him. Neither will he overlook any forbearance, any endurance, any covering over of personal grievances by the righteous. Trust him. When injustice threatens others or insults God’s name, even the meekest of God’s sons act. But often, when the injury is our own to bear, we do so by praying for our enemies, not punishing them, because we expect justice for them — perfectly meted out at the cross or in eternity — and we expect gracious rewards for our long-suffering according to God’s promise.

Man of War, Man of Peace

So, how can a man be meek in an evil world? How can he live among wolves and not become one?

He is lowly at crucial times in the way of David and Moses. He does not use meekness as an excuse for cowardice or apathy, but at God’s command he stands down and does good, trusting his promises of coming justice and reward. Does this describe you?

We must all learn from the Lord. No man was ever stronger and meeker than Jesus, the Lion of Judah’s tribe, who stood silent as a lamb before his shearers, offered instructions for his mother’s care with dying breaths, and prayed forgiveness — not curse — for those murdering him. To the tempted, the vengeful, the embittered, and the betrayed, Jesus cries, “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am meek and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls” (Matthew 11:29).

Such Christians conquer themselves by trusting in him. These are the men and women whom Jesus promises will one day, and one day soon, inherit the earth.

Bridge Street Cemetery
Northampton, Massachusetts

I found David Brainerd’s grave today with the help of a friend who knew where to look. Something about the simplicity and obscurity of this spot suits this unlikely hero quite well. The stonecutter didn’t give his work proper attention — he misspelled Brainerd’s name and got both his death date and his age wrong — but perhaps the amateur work was considered good enough for a poor man’s grave. Yet the etched marble still reads with surprising force:

Sacred to the Memory of
the Rev. David Brainard
A faithful and laborious
Missionary to the
Stockbridge, Delaware
and Susquehanna
Tribes of Indians.
Who died in this town
Oct 10 1747 [age] 32

This “faithful and laborious missionary” died of tuberculosis at age 29. The first indication of his terminal disease was when he started spitting up blood in college. He wrote in his diary of this shocking trial that he “looked death in the face” (The Diary and Journal of David Brainerd, 27). Over the next seven years, Brainerd would look into death’s hideous face many times in his sufferings. In the end, his was a slow, retching, suffocating death without the quieting comforts of hospice care. Jonathan Edwards wrote from Brainerd’s bedside,

He was in great distress and agonies of body. . . .

He told me it was impossible for any to conceive of the distress he felt in his breast. He manifested much concern lest he should dishonour God by impatience, under his extreme agony; which was such, that he said, the thought of enduring it one minute longer was almost insupportable. He desired that others would be much in lifting up their hearts continually to God for him, that God would support him, and give him patience. He signified, that he expected to die that night. (Diary and Journal, 255–56)

A few hours later, Brainerd’s tattered lungs and great heart finally gave out.

The Pity

Next to Brainerd is the grave of Jonathan Edwards’s daughter Jerusha, who died just shy of her eighteenth birthday. She served as David’s caregiver in his last months, which were spent in the Edwards’s home; she likely contracted tuberculosis from Brainerd and followed him in death four months later. Just days before David succumbed, they exchanged promises to meet each other in heaven, although they had no idea how soon that rendezvous would be.

The side-by-side gravestones keep the secrets of David and Jerusha’s affection and anguish, of their sorrow and certain hope, as we have only glimpses of their relationship from Brainerd’s posthumously published diary. Theirs was a short but sweet friendship, built on their shared and fervent love for Christ and his glory.

As I tug at the weeds and crabgrass that have crept around the old stones, I imagine Jonathan Edwards standing here. But I don’t picture him like the stiff old portrait of a New England divine. Instead, I see Edwards as friend and father, because the broken ground over Brainerd had barely settled before a fresh grave was dug next to it for his precious teenage daughter. His grief upon grief was assuaged by the hope upon hope of the gospel, but the grief was still real. The empty places and missing voices of lives cut short must have pierced his heart deeply.

In our haste for satisfying conclusions, Christians should not make too little of the pity of this story or any similar story today. Often, dying — not so much death — is too painful a prospect for us, so we tend to repackage it with sugar-sweet songs about suddenly finding ourselves walking around heaven and breathing celestial air. But this just hopscotches right over car wrecks and ventilators and cancer and open graves. For believers, “it is not death to die” is only half true. On the farther shore of the last river, faith becomes sight, and there the glory and grace of the Lamb is beyond imagining. But on this side, there is still a raging river to cross.

The Power

Brainerd, who had first “looked death in the face” as a college student, did not look away. Ever mindful of his Lord and of our vapor-like lives, he pointed to his pending grave as a witness:

When you see my grave, then remember what I said to you while I was alive . . . how the man who lies in that grave counselled and warned me to prepare for death. (Diary and Journal, 247)

Two years after Brainerd’s death, Edwards published the young missionary’s diaries and journals in The Life of David Brainerd. In God’s sovereign plan, the pity of Brainerd’s death would become power, the first drop before a downpour of a worldwide missions movement: Carey to India, Martyn to Persia, Judson to Burma, Morrison and Taylor to China, Moffatt to Africa. All of these were deeply impacted by the life of David Brainerd. But these are only the household names of missions history. The faith, endurance, and sufferings of Brainerd’s short ministry challenged untold thousands more to go to the ends of the earth with the glorious gospel.

The Life of David Brainerd is no breezy account of successful strategies and big breakthroughs. Maybe that’s why it appeals to so many missionaries and pastors. John Piper explains,

Why has this life had such a remarkable influence? . . .

The answer is that Brainerd’s life is a vivid, powerful testimony to the truth that God can and does use weak, sick, discouraged, beaten-down, lonely, struggling saints who cry to him day and night to accomplish amazing things for his glory. (The Hidden Smile of God, 132)

Sweet Comfort

For David Brainerd — and much later Jim Elliot — God chose that their stories would long outlive them. But what about believers who die young, for whom no book is written? What is the power of their short lives? This is a hard and painful question, especially for those, like Edwards, who stand nearest to the grave. I write not to minimize their lingering grief but to brighten their hope.

The power of Brainerd’s life was not his published diary. The power was that Brainerd lived a life given day by difficult day to pursuing Christ and pointing others to him. He was as good as his epitaph — “a faithful and laborious” servant. And Christ invites all to enter into that worthy fellowship — whether we are given five talents or two, many years or few. No matter how short the life, every faithful servant will hear the Master’s “Well done!” when faith becomes sight.

But if there’s power in a faithful life that spreads the fame of Christ to a dying world, then wouldn’t more influence, more witness, more years make more sense? Here, God’s sovereignty and goodness meet, and we are left to trust him. The number of our days is no cold, cosmic calculation that God assigns like an actuary. No. There’s a wise and eager love in the timing of our call home, and that’s a sweet comfort as I stand here where David, Jerusha, and many other saints sleep, who were “sown in weakness” but will be “raised in power” (1 Corinthians 15:43).

Because of the redemption Christ has accomplished, we are free to submit without fear to human rulers as we pursue the good works God has given us.

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Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. (Matthew 5:4)

On the face of it, Jesus’s second beatitude seems the closest to contradiction. Blessed — that is, happy — are those who mourn? The eighth and final beatitude on the persecuted and reviled comes close. But being persecuted and happy isn’t quite as paradoxical as being grieved and happy.

We might miss this irony because we don’t really know what blessedness means. Today we can’t rehearse enough what this blessedness is and is not. We call this opening salvo of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount “the Beatitudes” because of Jesus’s refrain (“Blessed . . . Blessed . . . Blessed . . .”), and beatitude is from the Latin beatus, meaning “blessed” or “happy.” Daniel Webster was still on top of it in 1828: Beatitude indicates “blessedness; felicity of the highest kind; consummate bliss; used of the joys of heaven.”

Having lost touch with these ancient roots in divine bliss, we’re quick to miss what an astounding, and then counterintuitive, offer of supreme happiness Jesus makes to us. With this “blessed” offer, he invites us into the very happiness of God himself, who made the world from his fullness, not emptiness, and magnifies his fullness as he gladly fills our emptiness. All eight beatitudes are counterintuitive, counter-worldly, but nothing challenges blessedness quite like mourning, grief, sadness, sorrow.

So, what does Jesus mean by declaring God’s own happiness over those who mourn?

Mourn What?

We do have one stated explanation in line:

Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

A biblically attuned ear might recognize the soundtrack: Isaiah 61:1–3 and the sweeping promises of final good for God’s own people. He will send his specially anointed “to bind up the brokenhearted” and “comfort all who mourn” (verses 1–2). All doesn’t mean every mourner everywhere but all who are his, all who are “in Zion” (as today we’d say “in Christ”). He will “grant to those who mourn in Zion . . . the oil of gladness instead of mourning” (verse 3).

Even as this great theme plays in the background, a first question emerges: What loss are God’s people mourning?

Isaiah’s hearers were mourning the decline and approaching devastation of their nation. Generation after generation had been raised on the triumphs of Moses and Joshua, of David and Solomon. Their own ancestors had been rescued from the depths of slavery, received God’s promise of their own land, and risen to stunning heights under David and his son. But three centuries later, the nation was a shell of its former self, waning inexorably in widespread disobedience to the covenant, while foreign powers arose and threatened to subjugate the weakening nation. Isaiah’s hearers loved their heritage, and mourned the loss of their honor and freedom.

In Jesus’s day, such mourning continued. Now the power was Rome. But the causes for grief were far more than political. The righteous remnant among them knew that beneath the humbling of Israel lay both the nation’s sin and the sins of every Israelite.

Even the wicked will mourn the loss of a beloved city (as the unbelieving grieve over Babylon, Revelation 18). The righteous in Christ mourn such losses too, but Christian mourning does not end with the loss of some love once enjoyed. It grieves sin against God, our own and others’ (1 Corinthians 5:2; 2 Corinthians 12:21).

Good Mourning

Good mourning grieves and weeps over genuine losses, as Jesus did at Lazarus’s tomb. And good mourning, in the very midst of mourning, tastes a sustaining joy. Even as we mourn what is now lost, we experience hope that the Giver of joy is not lost but stands ready to sustain us and satisfy us.

Good mourning also prepares the way for real joy. Which is in part why Ecclesiastes would say it’s good to visit the house of mourning (7:2). Greater joy, not lesser joy, lies on the other side of mourning. How could sorrow be better than laughter? Because “by sadness of face the heart is made glad” (7:3).

In fact, good mourning is essential to experience true spiritual joy. You have never lived one moment without a sin nature. And you’ve never lived one moment in a world not under the curse. Jesus didn’t come to pre-fall humans in the garden of primal joy to offer them the tree of life; he came to post-fall humans, under the curse of sin and death, to be himself the curse for our sins and so make the cross into a tree of life for us.

Who Comforts?

Now, we have a second question to answer in his second beatitude: Who will do the comforting?

Jesus’s word for comfort here is a common New Testament word (parakaleō) we often translate “urge,” “exhort,” or “encourage.” It’s not a comfort for the body provided by pillows. It’s a comfort for the spirit brought through words. The comfort Jesus promises for the mourning is spiritual comfort, a comfort of soul, presented through divine promises and gospel truth.

The rest of the New Testament will tell of how the apostles do this through their inspired epistles (1 Thessalonians 2:12; Hebrews 13:19, 22; 1 Peter 5:12). And vitally, the people of God do this for each other in mutually life-giving words (1 Thessalonians 4:18; 5:11; 2 Corinthians 13:11; Hebrews 3:13; 10:25). Church leaders do this for Christ’s people through word ministry (1 Thessalonians 3:2; 1 Timothy 5:1; 2 Timothy 4:2). But ultimately, in and through the words of apostles and pastors and fellow believers, the supreme comforter of holy, mourning souls is God himself, who comforts his people through his human vessels with the comfort that he himself provides (2 Corinthians 7:6).

Jesus Mourned and Wept

Let’s come back to Jesus, who speaks these Beatitudes. Jesus himself mourned. He lived here too, in this fallen, cursed world. And he wept (John 11:35). He was not sinful or immature to be a “man of sorrows.” Instead, his acquaintance with grief, as the perfect man, was a shining expression of his maturity and holiness. Brace yourself: In the days of his flesh, he prayed with loud cries and tears (Hebrews 5:7). And we find strength, not flaw, in those holy tears. It is not holy to live without grief in this age of sorrows. Nor is it honorable to grieve like unbelievers do — without deep, solid, stabilizing hope.

Nor does Paul leave any stoic example. Again and again he wets the pages of his letters with mention of his tears (Acts 20:19, 31; 2 Corinthians 2:4; Philippians 3:18). Both Christ himself and his apostle to the Gentiles lived this second beatitude in their own lives as they shed tears of this age while being upheld with the blessedness of God himself and the age to come. And in doing so, they showed us the nature of the kingdom Jesus came to bring and Paul gladly served till his death.

Christ’s is not a kingdom of pomp and strut, not a reign of swagger and coercion, not a kingdom of this world. So, as Don Carson observes,

Those who claim to experience all its joys without tears mistake the nature of the kingdom. (Matthew, 163)

A day is coming when our God will wipe away every tear (Revelation 7:17; 21:4). His sons will not always mourn. But until then, in this age of mourning, our Lord is honored by joy in sorrow, peace in pain, satisfaction in him in the midst of our sufferings, joy inexpressible even while grieved by various trials (1 Peter 1:6–8).

Jesus is not honored by any pretense to be rid of sorrows prematurely. But he appoints for us griefs in this world — and with them, his sustaining grace to keep us.

True and final happiness is for those who mourn for now.