THE STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN

About the Book

The premise of this book is that the Beatitudes are like a stairway, each one leading to the next as a logical consequence of the one that came before, and that the rest of Matthew chapter 5 is a commentary, a fleshing out of the consequences of what the Beatitudes are designed to accomplish in our lives. The first Beatitude is salvation, and each of the others depict the gradual process of sanctification in our lives. In the rest of Matthew 5 Jesus shows us the true nature of our brokenness, and also the fantastic new identity we acquire once we enter the kingdom of heaven. This is not a scholarly work. It is about such wonderful news that God wanted to come here to tell it to us personally, as a loving human teacher. It can be read in a day or a weekend, or twenty minutes a day, as a devotional. It can be read more than once, with growing pleasure. It is not an analysis of what the great thinkers of the past have said. It references no commentaries. It is one man’s insight gained by reading the Word, and looking up the meanings of the individual words, and contemplating what it adds up to. It is something that anyone can do, if they listen as they read, and ask the text questions. While it is nice to achieve letters behind our name, and become experts on scripture, most of us never will do that. But we all can hear from God when He speaks to us through His Word. There is a joy of discovery we can experience when we delve into the Bible. The Beatitudes can be thought of as Jesus’ introduction to how we start out on that path.

About the Author

Patrick Murphy runs a small business in the American Midwest. He has wide ranging interests, including history and philosophy, and especially all that pertains to the Bible. He is the author of How the West was Lost: Coping With Life in a Strange, New Civilization, wherein he presents his theory that the civilization that Christianity created after the fall of ancient Rome (what we call “the West”) has already ended. He builds the case that we are currently living in a new, as yet unnamed civilization, which is characterized by distinctly different assumptions about life and reality itself—but we haven’t recognized it yet. This new civilization can be detected in the many astonishing new, ways of perceiving life, indeed reality itself, that we have quickly come to take for granted. Indeed, no matter how fast they multiply, we tend to feel as if it has always been this way—but people living a hundred years before us would find most things about our era incomprehensible, shocking or despicable. The list of examples is long and lengthening, but just think of any current issue that relates to sex and you will get the picture. It’s all around us, but since fish don’t know they’re wet, we don’t notice it. The civilization a person grows up inside of is to that person reality itself; to question its assumptions is like questioning the notion that we should breathe air, or eat food. Yet, in our time, the essential things of Christian, or Western, civilization—the air and food of that lost world—are rejected, and things completely foreign to it are assumed to be essential to social life itself. It is as if we have returned to ancient Rome.