The next verse serves as the peak of the inward journey that occurs across the first four beatitudes:
‘Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.’ Matthew 5:6.
To a modern audience accustomed to immediate gratification and abundance, the concepts of hunger and thirst can seem like minor or temporary discomforts. However, in the ancient world, they evoked the reality of a person stranded in an arid landscape, at risk of death. Jesus wasn’t describing a casual desire for righteousness, but a survival-driven, desperate need.
Righteousness is the legal state of being right before God. It’s a gift of justification, where he cleanses us from past sins and counts us as righteous by virtue of Jesus’ sacrifice. Righteousness also speaks to living in alignment with God’s Word. To hunger and thirst for righteousness is to crave a restored relationship with God and a life shaped by his holiness.
In the original Greek context, the phrasing used for hungering and thirsting is grammatically distinct. Typically, in Greek, one would ‘hunger or thirst’ for a part of something (such as a slice of bread or a cup of water). However, Jesus uses a grammatical construction where the desire is directed at the entirety of the object. He’s speaking to a hunger for whole, uncompromised righteousness.
This posture stands in direct opposition to the counterfeit appetites of the world. Humanity routinely attempts to satisfy its innate spiritual hunger with temporal substitutes, wherein individuals try to manufacture their own goodness through performance. The paradox is that the people who think they have enough don’t seek more, but the hungry and thirsty do, and they are the ones God fills.
When we redirect our deepest appetites away from self-sufficiency and towards the righteousness of Christ, God promises a complete and overflowing satisfaction. It’s a divine exchange. We bring him our profound emptiness, and by right of our adoption into the Kingdom, he satisfies our souls with his enduring presence and makes us righteous.
Ultimately, this beatitude marks the vital turning point of the series. Jesus has spoken to the importance of emptying ourselves—confessing our poverty, mourning our sin, and surrendering our strength. In so doing, he has ensured we are perfectly positioned to be entirely filled by the King, ready for his righteousness to overflow into the world around us.
View other devotionals in this series