“Blessed are you who hunger now, for you will be satisfied.”
(NET)
When you’re feeling hungry, you often set out to find food and banish that hunger with quite a singular focus, don’t you? The hungry person seeks satisfaction and sustenance. Consider now for a moment the last time you felt hungry, what did you do? For most of us, we live in a context where we simply move toward the nearest available source of food and consume it. If we need to pay a little for it, then so be it. The context into which Jesus spoke here contained people who knew about hunger (Luke 5.11, 28, for example). For them, to find sustenance and subdue hunger took a real focus, real effort, and brought real satisfaction.
Jesus is telling His disciples here (v.20) that those who follow Him and seek Him with such a singular focus would be satisfied.
Is Jesus lying here then? Is he saying things that He believes to be true but that actually have no basis in reality or truth?
These men that heard Him say “Blessed are you who hunger now, for you will be satisfied” all endured torturous circumstances and deaths for the hunger they had satisfied in Jesus (link below). They found something in and through Jesus that they could find nowhere else. The fact they were willing to give their lives for this hunger and satisfaction does seem to indicate that there was real substance to it. The only way to tell for sure if these are the words of a liar or a lunatic is to seek after Jesus with the focus of a hungry person and find out for yourself.
Have you ever done that? Are you willing to try that? Perhaps you already have but you’ve drifted in your focused pursuit. In the same way that you would find food when hungry, seek after Jesus today: His Word, His will, and His ways, and see how you will be satisfied.
James Travis 