Festival of All Saints – Matthew 5:1-12 (NKJV)
Today we celebrate All Saints Day during which we recognize the struggles which Chris-
tians endure on the path to eternal life. No individual Christian’s walk with God is easy.
The struggle and turmoil with which we deal internally is always different from that
which others observe from the outside. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus describes the
Christian as poor in spirit, sorrowful, meek, hungering for righteousness, merciful, pure
in heart, a peacemaker, persecuted, and one who is reviled. If the Christian is true to the
faith which God has given him by the power of the Holy Spirit, these aforementioned
attributes should be present in varying degrees. These attributes also remind us of how
cowardly we can be at times concerning the Christian faith. We remain silent when we
should speak. We speak hatefully when we should remain silent. Instead of hungering for
Jesus’ righteousness which covers all sin, we hunger for vengeance. We recognize that
our own hearts are evil in the sight of God. We would rather hide our trust in God’s Word
than be ridiculed for that faith.
When we read the beatitudes, as this portion of the sermon on the mount is called, we are
smitten with God’s law into the depths of our conscience and realize that if our blessed-
ness depended upon these godly attributes, we would never be blessed. While it is good
that God’s law reminds us of our failures to lead us to repentance, that is not Jesus’ inten-
tion in the beatitudes. The poetic structure of this wisdom literature leads us to believe
that blessedness is something we can earn by struggling through the attributes highlighted
by the beatitudes. Take verse 3 for example: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is
the kingdom of heaven.” The NKJV preserves the order and the poetic nature of begin-
ning each verse with blessed, but what the Greek is trying to tell us is this: “The poor in
spirit are blessed, because the kingdom of heaven is theirs.” These beatitudes have noth-
ing to do with earning the blessings that God desires to give, because God, in Christ, has
provided the greatest blessing of all. It can be likened to what Jesus says about the faith
of children, “Let the little children come to Me, and do not forbid them; for of such is the
kingdom of God.” The Christian is poor in spirit because he is willing to be schooled by
God’s word concerning spiritual things and when those spiritual things are revealed
through God’s word, the Christian believes it with the unquestioning faith of a little child.
The nature of the beatitudes is that these things are present in the life of the Christian be-
cause of the blessedness that is his through everything that God in Christ has already
done for him. The Christian is a saint because the works of Jesus have been imputed to
the one who believes. The descriptions of the Christian in the beatitudes do not cause
one’s blessedness, but are a reminder of what a Christian might have to endure because of
his faith and the blessedness is already his through faith.
Recently,I listened to an audio recording of a book published by Concordia Publishing
House entitled Man Up! The Quest for Masculinity. The book takes a look at scripture
and rightly encourages men to fulfill their roles in church, family, and society as defined
by the Word of God. In the book, the author, Jeffrey Hemmer, spends some time talking
about the hymns of the church and what good hymnody looks like. And in doing so, he
encourages Christian men to sing the hymns of the church but he recognizes that some
hymns are certainly more palatable for us men to sing than others. One of the hymns he
encourages Christians to make use of in the book is the hymn with which we opened our
service: The Son of God Goes Forth to War. After receiving this encouragement to sing
and learn this hymn by heart, our family has sung it several times since last year, and it will
always likely hold a special place in our hearts for the truth which is brought out through
these profound statements of faith.
Verse one is primarily about Jesus, the Son of God, and those who believe in Him. The
first verse gives us the Gospel. It calls us to follow our Lord’s train by following in his
footsteps and way of life by drawing our attention to what Jesus did for us while he lived
upon this earth. It reads as follows:
1. The Son of God goes forth to war
A kingly crown to gain.
His blood-red banner streams afar;
Who follows in His train?
Who best can drink His cup of woe,
Triumphant over pain,
Who patient bears his cross below,
He follows in His train.
For the one who believes in Jesus, there is an expectation that the believer will follow in
the path which Jesus took. And while we can with the Apostle Paul admit that we want to
do the good which God calls us to do, we also lack the ability to carry it out. (Rom 7) So
as we sing the first verse, it is easy to realize that even our best efforts to follow in Jesus’
train are thwarted by our own ideals of self-preservation and/or the weakness of our sin-
ful flesh. It is hard to follow Jesus in the path which he took towards glory, which was
fulfilled through His suffering and death on the cross. It was through His suffering and
death that He earned heaven, not just for you and me, but for all mankind. And by his res-
urrection from the grave, he proved that His sacrifice was successful.
Obviously, we can’t earn salvation for anyone else or even for ourselves, but Jesus does
call us to take up our cross and follow Him. He reminds his disciples that the world will
hate them, because the world hated Him first. The one who bears the cross of being a
Christian follows Jesus to eternal life. “We must through many tribulations, enter the
kingdom of God.” (Acts 14:22)
Verse 2 of our hymn turns our attention to the first Christian martyr, Stephen. He was
sharing with the Jews their history in how they always had a tendency to resist the Holy
Spirit. But instead of humbling themselves for their sins and the sins of their fathers they
gnashed their teeth at him. And he, being full of the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven and
saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. As Stephen told them
these things they stopped their ears and ran at him with one accord to carry him out of the
city to stone him. As they stoned Stephen, he was calling on God and saying, Lord Jesus,
receive my spirit. Then with a loud voice he knelt down and cried out, “Lord, do not
charge them with this sin.” And when he had said this, he fell asleep.
The martyr first whose eagle eye
Could pierce beyond the grave,
Who saw his Master in the sky
And called on Him to save.
Like Him, with pardon on His tongue,
In midst of mortal pain,
He prayed for them that did the wrong,
Who follows in his train?
It is no doubt a challenging thing to stand up for one’s faith in Christ in the midst of ad-
versity. Stephen was willing to suffer death for proclaiming the word of God. In faith,
Stephen trusted that God would deliver him. In death, Stephen was delivered. Those who
are persecuted for righteousness’ sake are blessed because theirs is the kingdom of
heaven. Scripture of course admonishes us to stand up for and speak the truth in love
even if it may be uncomfortable and reminds us to repent of those times when we fail to
speak. We are to be faithful to Christ and His Word, regardless of the cost.
In the third verse the author goes on to highlight the plight of the Apostles who received
the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. The bible doesn’t record the deaths of the apos-
tles, but church history records that all but one apostle was put to death for proclaiming
the good news about Jesus. The Apostles and other early evangelists were hanged, cruci-
fied, beheaded, fed to lions and killed by gladiators. It was illegal to practice Christianity
in the west until the early 300s AD, but despite the persecution and murder of God’s peo-
ple, the Good news that Jesus is both Lord and Savior continued turning people’s hearts
to trust in the Lord for forgiveness of sins and eternal life. Contrary to what we might ex-
pect, it is actually under the threat of persecution that Christianity seems to grow exponentially.
A glorious band, the chosen few,
On whom the Spirit came,
Twelve valiant saints; their hope they knew
And mocked the cross and flame.
They met the tyrant’s brandished steel,
The lion’s gory mane;
They bowed their neck the death to feel,
Who follows in their train?
The final verse of our hymn talks about the rest of those Christians who die in the faith.
These are the saints who have entered into their eternal rest by passing through physical
death. This noble army is made up of men and boys, women and girls. It is made of ordi-
nary people like you and me who have inherited the promised heavenly mansions above
by remaining faithful to God’s Word until death. The final verse reads as follows:
A noble army, men and boys,
The matron and the maid,
Around the Savior’s throne rejoice,
In robes of light arrayed.
They climbed the steep ascent of heav’n
Through peril, toil, and pain.
They bowed their neck the death to feel,
Who follows in their train?
Do you notice the deeply personal language of the hymnwriter who draws us to emulate
those Christians who have gone before us? The noble army of misfits is around the sav-
ior’s throne. Think of the poor, the maimed, the lame, and the blind from the parable of
the wedding banquet. They are clothed in the wedding garment of Christ’s righteousness
which covered all their sin. But how did they get there? They climbed the steep ascent of
heaven. That means that they kept the faith through the peril, toil, and pain of life. They
bowed their neck the death to feel, either through natural death or premature death. They
are part of a noble army not because of anything they did, but because Jesus called them
to it.
When I hear these words, I am reminded how awesome it is to be a child of God and how
blessed we are because of the faith which God has given us. And how our ultimate desire
is to follow the saints who have gone before us, by faithfully trusting in God’s Word and
promises, by hearing and reading them regularly and remembering that the only way to
heaven is to trust solely in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who by His holy life, His
perfect suffering and death, and by His resurrection from the dead has rescued us from
sin, death, and Satan.