Chapter Four: Meek
MEEK
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
MATTHEW 5:5
A friend of mine who is an entrepreneur was listening to a CD of a series of messages I had given on the Beatitudes. When he came to meekness, he told me, he skipped over it. He wasn’t interested in being meek. Like most Americans, he thought of a meek person as someone who is timid, spineless, unassertive, and easily dominated or intimidated. Some readers will recognize these traits as exemplified in a cartoon character of bygone years, Caspar Milquetoast, who has been described as a man who speaks softly and gets hit with a big stick.
The word for meek that Jesus used is far different. Meekness is not being timid, spineless, unassertive, and easily dominated. It is not a natural niceness. In fact, it has nothing to do with one’s personality or temperament. It is the work of the Holy Spirit within. Yet it is a character trait that can and should be cultivated in our lives.
The Greek word praus is usually translated as either “meek” or “gentle,” depending on the context. For purposes of this study I use meekness as our response to the often hurtful actions of other people or to the adversities God brings into our lives. There is then a twofold expression of meekness: first toward God and then toward other people. Meekness toward God involves
Responsiveness to God’s Word. To be responsive to God’s Word is to approach it as one who is “poor in spirit” —to recognize that there is still much unbelief and sin in one’s heart that needs to be exposed, acknowledged, repented of, and dealt with. The meek person reads Jesus’ words in Matthew 5:48 —“You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” —and realizes that however much he or she appears to be a nice person, they have not come close to the perfect righteousness God requires, which is to be found only in the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ.
As I reflect on our evangelical community to the extent I am aware of it, it seems we are more knowers of the Word than doers of the Word. We sit in church on Sunday and hear an inspiring or challenging message, and we agree with what we hear. We may even say we enjoyed the sermon. But once we leave the church, we forget about it. The same is true in principle with weekly Bible studies. We do some study at home, we come together and discuss what we have learned, but we do not take it home to reflect and pray over, or seek to apply what we learned in our daily lives.
We do not receive with meekness the “implanted” Word of God (James 1:21). Instead we too often use the Scriptures not as a means of judging ourselves but as a means of judging others, especially those whose sins are more flagrant than ours. The meek person, in contrast, searches the Scriptures (or listens to it taught) not to judge others but to allow the Holy Spirit to judge him or her. In fact, the meek person earnestly desires the Spirit to use His Word to effect a deep change in his or her inner being.
So we see that these character traits of the Beatitudes build on one another. Only the person who is “poor in spirit,” who recognizes his or her own remaining spiritual poverty, and who “mourns” over his or her sin will want to be responsive to God’s Word as a means of dealing with sin and growing in Christlike character.
Submission to God’s providence requires first that we understand the meaning of the term. Briefly, for purposes of this study, providence refers to God’s sovereign rule over His entire creation, controlling, directing, and orchestrating all events and circumstances to accomplish His purposes. In support of that statement consider the following Scriptures:
For the LORD of hosts has purposed,
and who will annul it?
His hand is stretched out,
and who will turn it back?
ISAIAH 14:27
For I am God, and there is no other;
I am God, and there is none like me,
declaring the end from the beginning
and from ancient times things not yet done,
saying, “My counsel shall stand,
and I will accomplish all my purpose.”
ISAIAH 46:9-10
All the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as nothing,
and he does according to his will among the host of heaven
and among the inhabitants of the earth;
and none can stay his hand
or say to him, “What have you done?”
DANIEL 4:35
Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit” —yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.”
JAMES 4:13-15
So we see that God does as He wills, and we can do nothing except what He wills. This would be terrifying if that were all we knew about God. But God is not only sovereign; He is perfect in His unfailing love and infinite in His wisdom, which is far beyond our ability to understand.
Submission to God’s providence, then, means we recognize that there is yet much work to be done in our character. God uses adversities as one means of doing that work (see Hebrews 12:5-11). It means that we accept the difficult and painful events of life, even those brought about by the actions of other people, as under the controlling hand of our loving and infinitely wise heavenly Father. It means we believe that God causes all events in our lives, whether good or bad as we judge them, to work together to conform us more and more into the likeness of Christ (Romans 8:28-29). It means that we give thanks in all circumstances (1 Thessalonians 5:18) —not for the circumstance considered in itself, but for God’s promise to use these circumstances to conform us more to Christ.
I confess that giving thanks in all circumstances is a challenge for me these days. Among other things, at the age of eighty-six I am dealing with several significant health issues that make life increasingly difficult. So how do I give thanks in these situations?
I mentioned above that God causes all our circumstances to work together to conform us more to Christ. That’s great for the future, but what about today, when I am experiencing one of those inconveniences? For this I go to the latter part of Hebrews 13:5, where God promises, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” In the Greek this is an emphatic statement. It is as if God is saying, “No! I will never leave you. No! I will never forsake you.”
So I pray something like this: “God, this is a very difficult time for me, but you have promised two things: first, that you will not forsake me in this situation; and second, that in your infinite wisdom you will use this difficult circumstance to conform me more to the image of Christ.”
I probably will never know how He does this, or even what the specific result will be. But God really does mean what He says. Several months ago I was chafing under some difficult providence of God. The thought came into my mind, almost as if God were speaking, “Which would you rather I do: remove this difficult circumstance, or use it to conform you more to the image of My Son?” Through that thought God gave me the meekness to accept what He was doing.
So far in this chapter we have considered the blessing of meekness toward God. The other aspect of Jesus’ teaching here is meekness toward other people. The Puritan Thomas Watson wrote that meekness toward other people consists of three things: the bearing of injuries, the forgiving of injuries, and the returning of good for evil.[3] Let’s analyze what these three expressions of meekness look like in everyday life.
Bearing of injuries is a response with meekness to the hurts of other people. It may be unjust criticism, unkind gossip, or even slander. It may be that, in speaking to you, someone puts you down. It may be that you are passed over for a promotion in favor of someone clearly less deserving. There are numerous ways people can hurt us.
What does meekness look like in these situations? Peter helps us when he said of Jesus,
When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly.
1 PETER 2:23
Some readers may think I am advocating “doormat” Christianity, where we allow people to run roughshod over us. There are Christian responses to keep this from happening, but we have to balance these with the fact that Jesus was the ultimate “doormat”: He allowed Himself to be crucified by wicked men.
One of the greatest tests of our meekness is the way we deal with the hurts dealt to us by other people. So instead of harboring resentment toward them, let us entrust ourselves to God who causes all these hurts to work together for our good.
The second expression of meekness is forgiving the injuries or sins of others. The classic passage of Scripture on forgiving others is the parable of the unforgiving servant found in Matthew 18:23-35; we are going to look at this passage in depth in chapter 6. But for now consider the following Scriptures:
Ephesians and Colossians were written at about the same time, so it is not surprising that Paul would write essentially the same thing regarding forgiveness in both letters. However, in Colossians he adds the words, “so you also must forgive.” The truth I hope you will see is that in both of the above Scriptures, our forgiving one another is linked to our forgiveness from God.
This idea takes us back to the first character trait in the Beatitudes, “poor in spirit.” Our willingness to forgive others is proportional to our realization, in the depths of our hearts, of how much we have been forgiven by God. If we are comfortable in our decent lifestyle because we do not commit the flagrant sins of our society, and if we do not see much need for continual forgiveness, then we are not likely to readily forgive others when they sin against us.
Those who are “poor in spirit,” however, recognize more and more how much sin and corruption is still present in their hearts. They recognize that though they have been given a new heart (Ezekiel 36:26), their heart is still deceitful (Jeremiah 17:9), and the flesh, or sinful nature, that still dwells in them strives against the Spirit within us every day (Galatians 5:17).
Now we need to go back to Paul’s words in Colossians 3:13: “So you also must forgive.” In effect, Paul is saying that we don’t have a choice: Because we have been forgiven so much, we have an obligation to forgive those who sin against us. Yet our motive for forgiving should not be our obligation but the realization of how much we have been forgiven.
I think of Paul’s letter to his dear friend Philemon, written at about the same time he wrote Ephesians and Colossians. Philemon was no doubt wealthy, for his house was large enough to accommodate a church. Philemon also had a slave, Onesimus, who apparently had run away but ended up meeting Paul in Rome. Paul led him to Christ; in Philemon 1:10 he refers to Onesimus as “my child . . . whose father I became in my imprisonment.”
Paul had a sticky problem. He knew Onesimus needed to return to Philemon, but he desired that Philemon not only forgive Onesimus but receive him “as a beloved brother” (verse 16).
Paul’s letter appears in our Bibles as “the letter of Paul to Philemon.” Notice how he handles his request, in verses 8-9:
Though I am bold enough in Christ to command you to do what is required, yet for love’s sake I prefer to appeal to you —I, Paul, an old man and now a prisoner also for Christ Jesus.
In effect Paul says, “I could command you to do what is right, Philemon. You really have no choice but to forgive Onesimus.” Paul is saying, “You have a duty to forgive. To not forgive would be a sin against God.” But then Paul adds, “Yet for love’s sake I prefer to appeal to you.” Paul wants Philemon to want to do what he must do.
Reading between the lines, it appears that Onesimus had not only run away but had also stolen in the process. So Paul writes in verses 18-19,
If he has wronged you at all, or owes you anything, charge that to my account. I, Paul, write this with my own hand: I will repay it —to say nothing of your owing me even your own self.
These are touching words. Paul, in prison, says, “charge that to my account.” This is what Jesus says to the Father: “Charge Jerry’s sin to my account” —and He paid for it all through His death on the cross. Paul says, “I will repay it,” but he then reminds Philemon that Philemon owes even his own self to Paul (an acknowledgment that Paul led him to Christ). And so we owe our salvation entirely to Christ, who says to us, “Forgive as I have forgiven you” (see Ephesians 4:32).
This private and very personal letter from Paul to Philemon is more than just a letter. It is a part of the divinely inspired Scriptures. It is the very Word of God, and God providentially directed church councils to include it in the canon of Scripture for a reason. It serves as an illustration in a small way of what God has done for us through Christ.
Consider what we were. Paul says in Ephesians 2:1-3 that we were dead in our sins, that effectively we were slaves to the world, to the devil, and to the desires of our passions. Furthermore, we were by nature objects of God’s wrath. This is a far worse predicament than that of Onesimus. But God, who is rich in mercy, not only forgave us our enormous moral debt that stood against us (Colossians 2:13-14). He also “raised us up with Him and seated us with Him in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 2:6).
So we are to forgive as God forgave us. This is the command of God. But again, God wants us to forgive for love’s sake, not because we are commanded to do so. And the only thing that will motivate us to forgive for love’s sake is to be “poor in spirit” and recognize how much God has forgiven us.
The third area of meekness toward others is returning good for evil. The classic passage on this is Romans 12:14-21:
Very few of us in the West experience actual persecution today (see chapter 9). So in order to apply these instructions in our present-day culture, we need to restate the word persecute to mean anything that is done to harm us, to slander us, to defraud us, or to block our path to a promotion —anything that is damaging to us. And Paul’s instruction to us is to bless and not curse those who do these things.
One of the best ways to bless people is to pray for them. Often the perpetrators of these hurtful or harmful acts are fellow believers, so we can pray that God will bless them as we would want Him to bless us. If they are unbelievers, we can pray that God will draw them to believe in the gospel and trust Christ for salvation.
We certainly do not want to repay evil for evil. We don’t want to slander someone who has slandered us. Sad to say, this sometimes occurs in some of our churches, when unsubstantiated accusations are made back and forth.
Above all, we should never seek to avenge ourselves of wrong by doing evil to someone else. As I’ve thought about Paul’s admonitions in Romans 12, I’ve concluded that we do most of our harm to each other with our speech rather than our actions. So let us take to heart Paul’s instruction in Ephesians 4:29:
Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear.
Note the two absolutes in Paul’s words:
Paul also says in Titus 3:2, “Speak evil of no one.” This applies even to those who by their words have hurt us in some way.
You can see that meekness truly is humility in action. It takes humility to submit ourselves to and be convicted by God’s Word. It takes humility to not murmur or complain about the difficult and painful events in life, but instead to see them as God’s work of growing us more and more into the likeness of Christ. It takes humility to bear with and forgive those who hurt us in some way. And it certainly takes humility to repay evil with good. In summary I again quote John Blanchard:
Meekness is a defining grace, produced by the Holy Spirit in the life of the Christian, which characterizes that person’s response towards God and man. Meekness towards God is a spirit of submission to all of God’s dealings with us, especially those which cause us sorrow or pain, in the settled conviction that in all of these he is graciously, wisely and sovereignly working “for the good of those who love him” (Romans 8:28). Meekness towards man means bearing patiently with the hurtful actions of others and dealing gently with their failures, not only in the assurance that all of these are under God’s providential control, but in the knowledge that, left to ourselves, we have no claim to be any stronger than the weakest of our friends or any better than the worst of our enemies.”[4]