If God is so good, why are His followers so bad? PART 2
Jun 28, 2010
Last week I admitted that all Christians are, in one way or another, hypocrites. And I went so far as to offer sincere repentance to any and all who have been offended and put-off by the actions, words, and deeds of Jesus’ followers. But what more is there to say? What are skeptics missing here?
The True Gospel is Anti-Religion. Many of us have read the scathing critiques of religion and its adherents offered by Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche as well as those coming from our neighbors. However, what is shocking to most people is that even a cursory reading of the Prophets, Gospels, or Epistles will show that God hates hypocrisy more than any non-Christian ever could. Jesus routinely condemns external morality and self-righteousness, saving his harshest words for those who take the speck out of others’ eyes while a log remains stuck in their own eye (Matthew 7.5). Listen to Amos (an ancient prophet): I hate, I despise your [religious] feasts, I take no delight in your solemn assemblies (5.21). For another example, look at Matthew 23, a place where Jesus upbraids the religious leaders of the day for their blatant hypocrisy. His opening words give us the very definition of hypocrisy: "The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses' seat, so practice and observe whatever they tell you-but not what they do. For they preach, but do not practice. They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people's shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger.” There’s no problem with their teaching; it’s the non-practice of the teaching that is the problem, namely the neglecting of the weightiest matters of the law, “justice, mercy, and faithfulness (23.23).” Jesus then pronounces ‘woes’ or curses on them, calling them ‘children of hell,’ ‘blind guides,’ ‘fools,’ ‘greedy,’ ‘self-indulgent,’ ‘white-washed tombs,’ ‘serpents,’ and ‘brood of vipers.’ Can you imagine a more scathing contemporary critique of Christian hypocrisy that Jesus Himself offers? Therefore, if you are a critic of religious hypocrisy, you can’t reject Jesus on that basis—Jesus is with you.
This is why Jesus scandalously says that the religious hypocrite has no claim on me (Matt. 7.21-23). What does Jesus tell the religious people? “Truly I say to you, the tax collectors and prostitutes go into the Kingdom of God before you (Matt. 21.31).” In other words, the pimps and prostitutes will get it before the moral and religious people do.
So, what is the solution here? In the words of Tim Keller, the solution to the problem of Christian hypocrisy is not less Christianity, but a deeper and truer Christianity: “When Martin Luther King, Jr. confronted terrible abuses by the white churches in the South, he did not call them to loosen their Christian commitments. He did not say, religion has become the opium of the people; he did not say give up your moral standards; he did not say to loosen or give up our Christian beliefs. That would have never produced the change for which he was fighting. He used the Bible’s own provision for self-critique and called them to truer, firmer, deeper Christianity.” He called them to really live Christ’s call to protect the innocent, to see the image of God in all races, and to identify with the poor, oppressed, and marginalized. The solution then, is for Christians to go back to the heart of their Christian faith: a man who died a victim of injustice and preached good news to the poor. Any system of thought or belief must be judged on its own merits, not on the failure of its more wayward “citizens.”
As an example, let’s say you have a friend whose hero is Lebron James. Your friend admires Lebron so much that he dresses like Lebron, records his commercials, uses the training equipment Lebron uses, and even practices on the same court as Lebron. Then let’s say you go out to play some basketball with your friend, and he only scores 2 points over the course of 4 pick up games. It would be absurd for you to then conclude that, since your friend imitates and follows Lebron, and your friend stinks at basketball, then it is absolutely the case that Lebron too must stink at basketball? No, the way you judge Lebron’s game is on the basis of how Lebron plays the game, not his imitators. In like manner, it is wrong to reject Christianity until you have encountered Christ directly—this does not excuse Christians’ hypocrisy. But neither does it excuse skeptics from giving Christianity a good, hard, honest look at Christianity on the basis of what Jesus’ claims are about himself, and whether or not he lived a life that backs up those claims.
Please note that the 3 entries on hypocrisy are adapted and developed on work from the Rev. Scott Sauls