The Stairway to Heaven: The Beatitudes and God's Plan for Your Life! :Looking at Matthew 5 with Fresh Eyes
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About this ebook
This is not a scholarly work. It is about such wonderful news that God wanted to come here to tell it to us personally, as a loving human teacher. It can be read in a day or a weekend, or twenty minutes a day, as a devotional. It can be read more than once, with growing pleasure.
It is not an analysis of what the great thinkers of the past have said. It references no commentaries. It is one mans insight gained by reading the Word, and looking up the meanings of the individual words, and contemplating what it adds up to. It is something that anyone can do, if they listen as they read, and ask the text questions. While it is nice to achieve letters behind our name, and become experts on scripture, most of us never will do that. But we all can hear from God when He speaks to us through His Word.
There is a joy of discovery we can experience when we delve into the Bible. The Beatitudes can be thought of as Jesus introduction to how we start out on that path.
Patrick Michael Murphy
Patrick Murphy runs a small business in the American Midwest. He has wide ranging interests, including history and philosophy, and especially all that pertains to the Bible. He is the author of How the West was Lost: Coping With Life in a Strange, New Civilization, wherein he presents his theory that the civilization that Christianity created after the fall of ancient Rome (what we call “the West”) has already ended. He builds the case that we are currently living in a new, as yet unnamed civilization, which is characterized by distinctly different assumptions about life and reality itself—but we haven’t recognized it yet. This new civilization can be detected in the many astonishing new, ways of perceiving life, indeed reality itself, that we have quickly come to take for granted. Indeed, no matter how fast they multiply, we tend to feel as if it has always been this way—but people living a hundred years before us would find most things about our era incomprehensible, shocking or despicable. The list of examples is long and lengthening, but just think of any current issue that relates to sex and you will get the picture. It’s all around us, but since fish don’t know they’re wet, we don’t notice it. The civilization a person grows up inside of is to that person reality itself; to question its assumptions is like questioning the notion that we should breathe air, or eat food. Yet, in our time, the essential things of Christian, or Western, civilization—the air and food of that lost world—are rejected, and things completely foreign to it are assumed to be essential to social life itself. It is as if we have returned to ancient Rome.
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The Stairway to Heaven - Patrick Michael Murphy
THE STAIRWAY
TO HEAVEN
The Beatitudes and God’s Plan
For Your Life!: Looking at Matthew 5 With Fresh Eyes
PATRICK MICHAEL MURPHY
41846.pngAuthorHouse™ LLC
1663 Liberty Drive
Bloomington, IN 47403
www.authorhouse.com
Phone: 1-800-839-8640
© 2014 Patrick Michael Murphy. All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.
Published by AuthorHouse 02/12/2014
ISBN: 978-1-4918-5935-3 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-4918-5934-6 (e)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014901979
Scripture quotations marked NASB are taken from the New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.
Refiner’s Fire (page 44, 45)
Written by Brian Doerksen
CCLI# 426298
(C) 1990 Mercy/Vineyard Publishing and Vineyard Songs Canada (Admin. by Vineyard Music).
"http://Vineyardworship.com"
Vineyardworship.com.
Used by Permission.
Surrender (page 45)
Written by Glenn Kaiser
From the album All My Days
(c) Grrr Records 1993
ASCAP
Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
To my father, Edward, who passed away before I discovered any of the things in this book. He is terribly missed.
And to my daughter, Claire, who collaborated with me on producing the cover of the book.
Contents
Prologue
Introduction
PART I
Chapter 1: Matthew Chapter 5
Chapter 2: God Opens His Mouth
Chapter 3: The Blessed Poor
Chapter 4: Blessed Mourning
Chapter 5: Meek and Blessed
Chapter 6: The Blessing of Desiring Righteousness
Chapter 7: Blessed are the Merciful
Chapter 8: Blessed are the Pure in Heart
Chapter 9: Blessed are the Peacemakers
Chapter 10: Blessed are the Persecuted
Chapter 11: Blessed are the Insulted
Chapter 12: Rejoice, Because You Have Now Joined the Ranks of the Prophets!
Chapter 13: Salt
Chapter 14: Light
PART II
Chapter 15: The Law and the Prophets
Chapter 16: The Least of These Commandments
Chapter 17: Anger, Good-for-nothings, and Fools
Chapter 18: Before You Worship God, Get Right With Your Brother
Chapter 19: Get Right With Adversaries
Chapter 20: A New Perspective on Sin
Chapter 21: What God Thinks About the Family
Chapter 22: Vows
Chapter 23: Turning the Other Cheek
Chapter 24: Love
Postscript
Prologue
I sit in my office, facing my computer. I do it every day. To my right is a bookshelf containing novels. Most of them are remnants of my past. These days, these decades, actually, I read mostly non fiction. History, philosophy, science, political stuff.
I glance over there lots of times a day, not really taking it in. It’s a chunk of my youth I’m seeing, but not thinking about. Hemingway, Fitzgerald. Joyce. It’s the backdrop.
In college I discovered B. Traven; I don’t know how. I do know it wasn’t assigned. It was extracurricular. But when I met Traven, I devoured him.
His books fit my lefty sensibility, but also my core anarchism, which is anything but leftist—an essential contradiction at the deepest part of me, although I would not come to understand these things until many years later. What I knew was, his writing resonated with my soul. He was writing about Indians in Mexico in the early part of the 20th century, for the most part, but he also wrote about Americans in Mexico—most notably The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. His approach was against tyranny of any kind, whether it is private individuals, companies, or the state that is the tyrant. In a way, his central preoccupation was opposition to the individual being enslaved, without regard for what kind of master does the enslaving.
I have thought about Traven’s books as I have gone through life. Great literature informs our outlook on the world.
The thing about Traven is that he is an unknown person. There arose a cottage industry of speculators as to who he was, even as he lived. To call him secretive would be to understate way too much. No one knew who he was. He seemingly wrote in German, definitely from Mexico. When I learned about this mystery, the best theory I heard about was that he was the Kaiser’s illegitimate son. I was content that this might explain it, and did not investigate.
One day, I can’t remember where, or when, I was in a used book store, and noticed a book called The Secret of the Sierra Madre: The Man Who Was B. Traven, by Will Wyatt. Naturally, I bought it. It was a remainder, and I can’t imagine I paid more than a few dollars for it. It’s something I can’t not do: I have to buy books like that. But my Traven reading days were years behind me by then. I had no idea if I’d ever take him up again, much less ever read this book about the mystery. But the price was right, and since my love for Traven’s work can never die—and who knows if I’d ever stumble upon it again (I never did)—the book joined Traven’s on my shelves of novels, there for me to see it whenever I glance up at the bookshelf on the right, when I tire of looking at the computer screen. And never give it a thought.
Until one day.
I don’t know about you, but books just jump into my hands. Always have done.
If you don’t know the wonderfulness of that, you’re missing out. I used to haunt bookstores, when there still were such things, and waited for the books to tell me to read them. One, I think, kept telling me that back in my early bookstore-haunting days—the mid 1970s: The Late Great Planet Earth. Would that I had listened to that call! My life would have been a far better one. So much sin could have been avoided. That book beckoned me countless times, and I relentlessly resisted. I wonder why.
A decade or so later, it turned out to be a key to saving my soul. How much heartache would I have saved myself and countless others if I had let it jump into my hands back when I was a teenager! But we can be hard hearted, fallen wretches that we are, and are prone to such things.
So I was sitting here, as I say, taking a moment away from the screen, and my eyes fell upon The Secret of the Sierra Madre, for perhaps the millionth time, but this time the book told me to read it.
So I did.
There are many books I have read many times. Some, I have reread for a psychological need. The Catcher in the Rye, for example. It’s unlikely I will read that one again. Some should be reread every decade or so for the sheer pleasure of it. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, obviously. To Kill a Mockingbird. And I could not imagine reading Sometimes a Great Notion too many times.
The Lord of the Rings beckons me every five or ten years, and I grow in maturity by its instruction every time.
1984. Anyone living in our era who does not know that book well—really well—is a fool. It is a foolishness that can be cured. Read it, and reread it every five years until you really know it.
I reread The Lord of the Rings when it tells me to. I have learned to listen to it. It is always just the right thing to do, and I am always very grateful I listened. Tolkien’s message is so Biblical, it’s