“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for right­eous­ness, for they shall be satisfied.”

So in Part 1, I — in a purely raw and unin­formed way — came to the con­clu­sion that hunger and thirst are not things to which man comes by choice. I can’t sim­ply set out to hunger or just up and decide to thirst. These are things we have by nature, and therein, by the will of God. To that end, we can con­clude that a person’s hunger and thirst for right­eous­ness are not things that a per­son can sim­ply decide to have either, and the hunger and thirst them­selves must be given by God.

In think­ing on this path, I came upon a ques­tion: what of those who DON’T hunger and thirst for right­eous­ness? I sup­pose one answer (and maybe the least sen­si­tive) is that God decides who is to have that hunger and thirst, and if some­one doesn’t, then it’s by God’s will. (A vari­ant on the pre­des­ti­na­tion the­ol­ogy.) But that doesn’t sound quite right. For one, hunger and thirst aren’t con­stants. I’m not hun­gry all the time (although look­ing at me, you might think oth­er­wise!), and I’m not thirsty all the time. There’s an ebb and a flow to it, pri­mar­ily depen­dent on when I last ate or drank.

This leads briefly to another ques­tion — does the metaphor extend this far? Does a person’s hunger and thirst for rightous­ness abate once right­eous­ness is had? I think, quite prob­a­bly, to answer that ques­tion, you have to define right­eous­ness, and I think that might be a topic for another discussion.

For the sake of right now, let’s step back from there and leave it that hunger and thirst do indeed wax and wane. If your hunger and thirst are not con­stants — if at some point in your life you may be more thirsty than at another point — then it’s rea­son­able to con­clude that, if you don’t have a cer­tain amount of hunger or thirst for rightous­ness RIGHT NOW, it doesn’t mean you won’t ever have a greater crav­ing. This also lends cre­dence to the argu­ment that God didn’t sim­ply decide whether you would have a hunger and will never take action to increase that hunger in you.

So, to the point. What if I cur­rently don’t have that hunger and thirst? Do I DESIRE to? If I do, then I think all I can do is ask. As a caveat to this, because I know many of us believe that ask­ing does no good — that God often does not respond — by way of encour­age­ment, let me remind you of some­thing Jesus said later in the same sitting:

If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your chil­dren, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him! (Matt. 7:11)

And also, may I remind you that in the tit­u­lar verse of dis­cus­sion — as we found in Part 1 — Jesus may be paint­ing a pic­ture of a God who gives this crav­ing as well as sat­is­fies it. One who SETS OUT to give this gift of right­eous­ness as a response to a crav­ing that he implanted. If Jesus is talk­ing about that God, then when we ask him to imbue in us a greater hunger and a deeper thirst for rightous­ness, I think then, too, he would respond.

It seems that, the more we dis­cuss this, the more we make the same won­der­ful con­clu­sion: God is gen­er­ous and wants to satisfy.