Be Still And Know

Matthew 5:3 NLT 'God blesses those who are poor and realize their need for him, for the Kingdom of Heaven is theirs.' Blessing is most easily associated with happiness. Some of the translations of the scripture replace the word “Blessed” for “Happy” in the opening statements of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Governments have also, in recent years, become obsessed with seeking to understand the determinants of happiness, or ‘well-being’ as it is often now called. Government seeks to identify some interventionist mechanism that might increase personal happiness in the hope that it might boost popularity at the polls. Yet, Adam Smith, the great Scottish ‘Father of economics’ in the eighteenth century warned against the person who “seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chessboard”. Here, Jesus presents a series of paradoxical statements. A paradox is a statement that appears to contradict itself. Here Jesus loc