Posted on 02/02/2017 2:43:18 PM PST by Kaslin
One of the sharpest criticisms that comes against Bible-quoting, conservative Christians is that we are hypocrites, failing to live by the very book that we so zealously quote.
Sadly, that criticism is often true.
To give just one example (and as I’ve said countless times), no-fault, heterosexual divorce in the evangelical church has done more to undermine marriage than all gay activists combined.
But we conservative believers hardly have a monopoly on hypocrisy. To the contrary, the Bible-quoting hypocrisy of the liberal left is far more galling than our conservative Christian hypocrisy. We, for our part, truly believe the Bible to be God’s Word and seek to live by it (even though failingly so at times), whereas the liberal left often despises the authority of Scripture except for a few select passages that it misuses for its purposes.
This has come into glaring clarity in light of the president’s executive order concerning refugees. Suddenly, Hollywood elites and their liberal colleagues are quoting the same book that they openly mock, especially when it comes to moral and spiritual standards.
They can’t have it both ways.
Either God’s Word has authority or it does not, and you cannot accept its moral imperative in one place and reject its moral imperative in another place. It simply does not work.
A critic might say, “But you do the exact same thing. You pick and choose what verses you follow.”
Actually, that’s not the case. We have a grid through which we read the Bible – a grid given us by the Bible itself – and we use the Scriptures to interpret the Scriptures.
For example, we learn that God gave Israel certain laws to keep them separate from the nations, even though the laws were not based on moral absolutes. A good example would be, “Don’t wear garments with mixed fabric” (Leviticus 19:19; Deuteronomy 22:11), even though there is nothing morally wrong about doing so. It was simply wrong for Israel because God was teaching them to be separate from the other nations.
On the flip side, when the Ten Commandments say, “Do not murder,” it is based on an absolute moral prohibition, one that is binding for all people everywhere.
So, while Christians today are not obligated to keep these specific laws of separation (which include the dietary laws), they are obligated to keep the universal moral prohibitions of the Bible, which include prohibitions against adultery and stealing and murder.
The left-wing, hypocritical Bible-quoters, have no such grid. Instead, they learn a few verses (or, snippets of verses) and quote them with smug self-assurance, not realizing that the book they are selectively quoting actually condemns the lives they are living
For a number of years, their favorite verse has been, “Jesus said ‘Don’t judge,’ but you’re guilty of judging me!” – and they say this as they harshly judge us.
What they fail to realize is that Jesus was teaching us not to judge superficially or hypocritically and not to condemn so that we could judge righteously rather than by superficial appearances (see Matthew 7:1-6; John 7:24).
And this same Jesus often warned about hell fire, taught that the path to God was narrow and straight, stated that He was the only way to the heavenly Father, and made clear that those who rejected Him would die in their sins – among many other exclusionary and flesh-offending statements. As for the moral standards of the Law – including sexual standards – He took them to a higher level.
To the Bible-citing Hollywood elites and your ultra-liberal colleagues, are you sure you want to be quoting the words of Jesus?
But the hypocrisy has gotten worse after President Trump’s executive order putting a temporary halt on incoming refugees from seven Middle Eastern countries. These one-time Bible-mockers are now quoting the words of the Torah in the Old Testament – yes, those supposedly antiquated, misogynist, bigoted words – reminding us of Israel’s calling to care for the refugee and the foreigner in their midst.
Of course, I totally affirm this ethic and call, and since we are a nation of immigrants, it applies all the more to us, just as it applied especially to the people of Israel, who themselves had been mistreated when they lived in Egypt: Don’t do to the foreigners what Egypt did to you!
But let’s put this compassionate command in context. The ancient Israelites were first commanded to exterminate the Canaanites who lived in the land they were about to inherit – including men, women, and children – because the spiritual and moral wickedness of the Canaanites was so great that it would pollute and destroy the Israelites should any survive.
That’s what I call extreme, yet it was a one-time command for ancient Israel, only after God waited 400 years until the wickedness of the Canaanites reached horrific proportions (see Genesis 15:16).
So then, the same God who called for compassion on the non-hostile foreigner seeking refuge among the people of Israel also called for the elimination of hostile foreigners (similar to candidate Trump’s call to “bomb the h-ll out of Isis”).
Not only so, but the non-hostile foreigners who took refuge in Israel were required to assimilate into Israel’s culture and were expected to live by Israel’s laws (see, e.g., Numbers 15:29). Is that a standard we’re ready to apply here as well?
More galling still is the liberal left’s quotation of Torah law pertaining to care for the refugee while ignoring the Torah’s strict moral code, which universally forbade homosexual practice and adultery under penalty of death.
For the record, these prohibitions are upheld by the New Testament (both by Jesus and Paul), the difference being that instead of a physical death penalty there is a penalty of spiritual death, which in many ways is far worse.
The bottom line, then, is simple: By all means, keep quoting the Scriptures and calling America to live by the morality of the Bible. Just don’t do it selectively.
And the next time conservative Christians do the same, don’t yell back at us, “Separation of church and state!”
Fair enough?
The left has largely succeeded in changing the definition of hypocrisy to include everyone who believes in any definition of right and wrong.
All fall short. All sin. Trying, failing, repenting, and resuming the effort is not hypocrisy. It’s just human.
Berating people for not maintaining standards you have no intention of trying to maintain yourself, as the demonrats and other forces of evil do constantly: now *that’s* hypocrisy.
Knowing what is right but failing to do it is not hypocrisy.
I wish people knew the difference.
We have a new commandment " This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you."
The early Church was attacked by those who wanted to bring them back under the law....not much has changed today.
and we use the Scriptures to interpret the Scriptures.
I would suggest Jesus was (in that passage)describing the New Testament Covenant, in that loving GOD and loving your neighbor satisfies all of the requirments of the law.
Am I my brothers keeper?
I respectfully disagree:
Hypocrisy literally means “to under-judge”: to judge one person by a lesser standard than another person; that first person is often oneself, but not necessarily so.
A perfect example is the way the Left judges William Clinton by a lesser sexual standard than they do any Republican. The hypocrites who defend him may themselves be relatively upright sexually; they are nevertheless entirely hypocritical.
The kind of pretense so often called hypocrisy (i.e., being a phony) is actually more correctly termed imposture: pretending to be or do something one is not or does not.
Another way to look at it is this: Some of the Sanhedrin were themselves very devout, and did just what they advocated; however, they may have overlooked it when one of their own did not, while expecting the common Jew to observe it completely. That was hypocrisy.
Therefore, to be a hypocrite does not necessarily make one an impostor.
This has long mattered to me not only as an ordained minister, but as a writer who values Standard English.
Yes, the use you cite is common; that does not mean it is accurate or preferable.
(I refuse also to abuse the term “gay” for a homoerotic person, even though many would say that it is too late to salvage the meaning of such a word; I refuse to meekly submit to the degradation of our language - just as I refuse to submit to the linguistic taboos that the Mohammedans are attempting to impose upon Americans.)
P.S.
I assume you were contrasting this with what is often termed a sin of omission.
The greek root for Hypocrisy means “actor”. When Jesus used the term we know as hypocrite, it was meant in the greek meaning of actor at least as it was translated most likely from the Aramaic.(Luke was probably written in greek as Luke was a physician). While Hypocrisy includes most of what you said, it also includes being an impostor or to act as something that one is not, or to judge others on issues that one is himself guilty of or even worse. Hence...”why choke on gnats when one swallows camels....why complain about the splinters in another’s eye when one has a “beam” in one’s own”? That’s hypocrisy!
The Old testament has a scripture that reads...”There is a time coming where men will no longer say to one another...”Know the Lord!” as everyone will be given perfect knowledge of His glory filling the Earth as waters cover the sea”. It speaks of a tendency for folks to “Lord it over” one another or for some to pretend they have better knowledge that the rest of us.(which is not to say that in our time period there aren’t those so gifted by God...but it takes testing, and discernment born of conviction to know which is which)
I’m guessing you wear breaking down the term hypocrite by saying “hypo”=under and “crite”= a root meaning to criticize or “judge”?
You have to look at the whole word origins of terms to understand why they came to mean what they mean....their meanings can’t be always gleaned by breaking apart their syllables.
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