“You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.” Matthew 7:5
August 15, 2023
We are hearing a lot about “mental illness” these days. With mental sins being in exile our secularized society has to find vocabulary that avoids responsibility for self-generated evils such as adulteries, coveting, murder, envy, pride, and slander (see Jesus on this in Mark 7:21-23). Interestingly, Jesus goes after the religious crowd for faking virtue. One perceptive writer captures the mental vice of the evil of hypocrisy very well: “To do its worst, evil needs to look its best. Evil has to spend a lot on makeup” (Cornelius Plantinga, Jr.). How easily and self-deceptively we can slide into putting on a mask of virtue while hiding a vice. The prophet Isaiah (as God’s mouthpiece) unmasked the hypocrisy of his fellow Jews by telling them, “I have had my fill of burnt sacrifices, of rams and the fat from steers” (Isa. 1:11). He said more, but you get the point. God is more interested in obedience to Him than He is in dutiful ritual. Jesus excoriated the Pharisees for creating ethical loopholes while avoiding doing the right thing (Matt. 23:13-29). Let’s do an echocardiogram on ourselves. Do we raise our hands in the song service and sing heartily about loving Jesus while verbally abusing our family? We can condemn the immorality of others while entertaining ourselves with pornography on the internet. Do we judge others for their lack of self-discipline while over-indulging in our eating habits and cable binging? If we want to take the right medicine for mental illness we can work at putting “on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to arouse its desires” (Rom. 13:14).
H
“It is an awful hypocrisy that declares with the lips what it denies with the life. The shame of too many church members is that they lead a double life, they fear the Lord and serve their own gods.” Vance Havner