The Post-Mortem of a Hypocrite (Rom. 2:17-24)

 

In a past sermon from earlier in this chapter (on 2:1-4), we considered the danger of hypocrisy.  But in this text, we see that the apostle is revisiting this sin and applying it directly to his kinsmen, the Jews.  Paul’s point, we must remember, is to set before us a mirror in which we can see ourselves for what we are – sinners by nature and by practice – and to take away every excuse humanity puts up to avoid the reality that we are not right, that we are by nature exposed to and already under the judgment of God because we are ungodly and unjust.  It turns out that hypocrisy is not only endemic to corrupt human nature – we are all guilty of it in one way or the other – it is also one of the things that keeps us from seeing ourselves for what we are.  Hypocrisy is a symptom of moral blindness, a sickness that makes us think we are well when we are not.  So it’s no wonder the apostle comes back to this.  He wants us to be utterly convinced that we desperately need the salvation accomplished by Christ and so hypocrisy is something that has to be addressed and dealt with thoroughly.

I know that the apostle is addressing Jews directly here, but I think we could easily put in “you who were raised in a Christian home,” or “you professing Christian” here.  And I think this is something that all of us need to think about, whether you are a genuine Christian or not.  Being saved, being born again to life in Christ, doesn’t make us immune from the danger of hypocrisy, as we have again been reminded of this past week when a well-known pastor was removed from all positions of ministry after he confessed to having an inappropriate relationship with a woman.  To be honest, when I heard that, I was shocked: he was not the kind of guy that I would have expected this to happen to.  He was an older man, and he seemed to have lived a life of integrity.  He certainly preached that people should live that way.  The problem was that he wasn’t.

Now we shouldn’t hear about things like that and respond by patting ourselves on the back that we haven’t spoiled our reputation that way.  A couple of Biblical passages come to mind here.  Let the one who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall (1 Cor. 10:12).  We are to consider ourselves lest we also be tempted (Gal. 6:1).  I think we should take heed to the resolution of a nineteen year-old Jonathan Edwards: “Resolved, to act, in all respects, both speaking and doing, as if nobody had been so vile as I, and as if I had committed the same sins, or had the same infirmities or failings as others; and that I will let the knowledge of their failings promote nothing but shame in myself, and prove only an occasion of my confessing my own sins and misery to God.”

We ought to do what Edwards did and let the fall of others promote the pursuit of a better self-knowledge with lots of humility and a recognition that we could easily do the same thing.  It ought to stir us up to a greater vigilance and watchfulness over our own souls.  It ought to make us look into our own hearts and see where hypocrisy is already at work.  

And that is what I want this text to do for us.  We’re going to look at this text and let it do a post-mortem on hypocrisy here, not for the sake of making ourselves feel better about ourselves, but in order to advance the cause of godliness and a genuine life of faith in Christ.  But we are not to stop at introspection.  This text is a mirror in which we can see ourselves, but the point of this mirror is not to keep us in front of the mirror.  The point is to get us to run to the gospel in which we meet Jesus Christ who can put our broken souls back together.  We need the gospel, the good news that Jesus Christ saves sinners.  He wasn’t and isn’t a sinner.  He has never been guilty of hypocrisy and never will be.  But he saves hypocrites.  He cleanses all who put their trust in him.  Preachers and pastors and other leaders in our lives may fall and fail us.  But praise God, Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever (Heb. 13:8).  No one who puts their trust in him will ever be ashamed (Rom. 10:11).

The text before us is not hard to interpret.  It’s pretty straightforward.  In verses 17-20, we have the self-assessment of the Jews: they rested in God’s law, they boasted in God, they knew his will in his word so that they could approve what God approved and condemn what God condemned.  They saw themselves as teachers; they were confident in their ability to pass the truth of God’s word on to others, especially to those who were ignorant of God’s law.  But in verses 21-24 we see that they didn’t do everything they taught.  They were hypocrites.  The heart of the accusation comes in verse 21: “Thou therefore which teachest another, teachest thou not thyself?”  He is accusing them of doing the very things they are preaching against.

Now Paul is not saying that every Jew in his day was a thief or an adulterer or a robber of idol-temples. (To “commit sacrilege” in verse 22 means to rob temples.  Apparently, some Jews had been willing to take merchandise from idol-temples in order to profit from it even though they claimed to be against idolatry!)  His point is to take several notorious violations of God’s law as examples.  And the point of these examples are simply to point us to the fact that we don’t always practice what we preach.  That’s true of all of us, isn’t it?  How can you read this and not be convicted?  And that’s the apostle’s point.  He wants to destroy the hypocrisy that we are hiding behind.  He wants us to see that the morality  we take comfort in actually destroys our self-righteous assessment of ourselves.  The law we preach, the Bible that we teach, condemns us too.  

Nor is Paul’s point that you have to be a serial adulterer or a life-long thief in order to qualify for the condemnation here.  One violation of the law is all it has to take. You claim to be an upholder of the law, but your failure at even one point can condemn you.  Your failure at one point shows that at that point you were a hypocrite.  King David didn’t spend his whole life committing adultery.  But that one failure with Bathsheba brought great shame on himself and exposed him as a hypocrite in that instance.  The same could be said of this pastor who had to step down this past week on account of his moral failure.  I don’t think we should automatically assume, at least not apart from the presence of evidence, that this was a consistent pattern of behavior on his part.  Maybe it was, but we shouldn’t assume it to be so.  But it is still hypocrisy.

The apostle shows us one of the reasons why this is so bad: “Thou that makest thy boast of the law, through breaking the law dishonourest thou God? For the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles through you, as it is written” (23-24).  Paul is basically quoting from the Septuagint text of Isaiah 52:5 here.  The background to that text is that the Gentiles looked at the Jews who were taken into captivity by the Assyrians and Babylonians and concluded that their God was apparently no better than the gods of the other nations who had not saved them from captivity either.  Now it was the Jew’s sins that led them into captivity, and it was God’s judgment upon them that led to that.  The captivity was not actually the result of God’s impotence or powerlessness.  But this is the way it was inevitably interpreted by heathen nations of the time.  So it was that Israel’s sins led to this blaspheming of God’s name.  And the apostle is saying that something similar happens when people who uphold God’s law go on by their inconsistency and hypocrisy to cause others to disregard and disrespect the word of God.  We see that this is something that happens to this very day.  A lot of people have never considered the evidence for the claims of Christ because they look at Christians who claim to represent him and they are disgusted by them.  Sometimes it is true that they do this for the wrong reasons, but sometimes you can’t blame them!  Hypocrisy is still a stumbling block to faith in Christ, and God’s name is blasphemed by it.

Now when I was looking at this text, I began by looking at verses 17-20 in a negative light.  I started by looking at these descriptions as if they were indications of hypocrisy.  But that’s really not the case, is it?  Every one of the things the apostle mentions are actually good things.  We should want to rest in the law, in the sense that it is reliable and worthy of our trust.  We should want to boast in God!  In fact, we must boast in God, not in ourselves.  As Paul himself put it, “God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world” (Gal. 6:14).  We should want to know God’s will in his word so that we can with discernment approve things that are more excellent.  In fact, the apostle prays for the Philippian believers “that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and in all judgment; that ye may approve things that are excellent; that ye may be sincere and without offence till the day of Christ” (Phil. 1:9-10).  We should want to have the confidence it takes to share God’s word and his gospel with those who don’t know it.  We should want to be “a guide of the blind, a light of them which are in darkness, an instructor of the foolish, a teacher of babes, which hast the form of knowledge and of the truth in the law” (Rom. 2:19-20).  These are not characteristics to avoid; these are qualities to aspire to!

So it's not that these things are bad; it’s that they are utterly surprising in light of what the apostle goes on to say about their behavior in the following verses.  Hypocrisy is a shocking moral disease because it allows a person to be swimming in the ocean depths of God’s truth without ever being truly affected and changed and convicted and enlightening by it.  It blinds us to the glory of Christ in the gospel; it renders us deaf to its pleas and warnings and promises; it makes us insensible to its instruction.  As a result, it leads to a double life that destroys our spiritual effectiveness and blasphemes God.  It makes for a questionable claim to true faith.  It is incompatible with true fellowship with God.  Ongoing hypocrisy received this kind of condemnation from Christ: “Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?” (Mt. 23:33).  This is serious and we ought to take it seriously.

The question then, is this: how does this happen?  How can I become so deaf to God’s own words?  How can I adopt the attitudes of verses 17-20 and the behavior of verses 21-23 leading to the blasphemy of God in verses 24-25?  I’m asking these questions, because it is only as we answer them that we will know the solution and the antidote to this problem of hypocrisy.  I will lay out three attitudes and behaviors that the Scriptures warn us against, and which will, I think, always be found in hypocrites.  In other word, hypocrisy is the symptom: we want to look deeper and understand the roots of hypocrisy.  There are at least three.

The Root of Hypocrisy

Hypocrisy is a symptom of elevating the honor of men above the honor of God in our esteem.

You cannot live to please men and please God at the same time.  That’s not what I think merely; it’s what Jesus said: “How can ye believe, which receive honour one of another, and seek not the honour that cometh from God only?” (Jn. 5:44).  Our Lord was addressing men who spent their lives studying the Scriptures (39), but they didn’t believe the one to whom all the Scriptures pointed.  They wouldn’t come to him that they might have life (40).  And our Lord says that the reason they wouldn’t believe is because they cared more about the honor of men than they did about the honor of God.  

Do you see how this connects to hypocrisy?  These men were religious men.  They were very publicly religious men.  And they carried on their religion in this public way because they wanted other men to see them as religious.  They wanted to be seen of men, as our Lord puts it in the Sermon on the Mount.  But in seeking the honor of men they could not simultaneously honor God with their lives.  Religion is supposed to be about the honor of God, but they were using it as a pretext for getting the honor of man.  And thus the hypocrisy.

Here's the danger and the problem: men can tell you that you’re doing great spiritually when your actually dead spiritually.  Like the church of Sardis which had a name that it lived when it was dead (Rev. 3:2), we too can have a great reputation but that’s all it is.  Reputation is not reality.  All men can see are the external things, and so the things that men value are very different from what God values.  God’s priorities are different from the priorities of man.  Paul put it this way to the Galatians: “For do I now persuade men [seeking their approval], or God? or do I seek to please men? for if I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ” (Gal. 1:10).  The Pharisees, whom our Lord denominates repeatedly as hypocrites in Matthew 23, says of them, “all their works they do for to be seen of men” (5).  So you see, esteeming the honor of men above the approval of God is wicked and it is a recipe for hypocrisy.  Beware of evaluating your life, not on the basis of what God’s word says, but on the basis of the opinions of other people.  Beware of loving the praise of men because it will kill a heart that serves and seeks the honor of God.

Hypocrisy is a symptom of unmortified sin in the life.

Do you know what I mean by unmortified sin?  To “mortify” is an old word, but it means to kill something.  We are told to mortify, to put to death, the sin in our lives (Rom. 8:13; Col. 3:5).  Unmortified sin is sin that we become easy with, that we learn to life with.  Unmortified sin is a cancer on the soul that may start out small, but it is allowed to grow.  We don’t try to zap it with radiation of God’s word zeroed in on the sin.

Unmortified sin is incompatible with genuineness before God.  You can’t grow in grace when your renting space in your heart to unrepentant sins.  It will have a deadening effect upon your soul.  It is inevitable.  I don’t care how long you have been a Christian; it will do it.  Note carefully what the apostle James tells us: “Wherefore lay apart all filthiness and superfluity of naughtiness [rampant wickedness, ESV], and receive with meekness the engrafted word, which is able to save your souls. But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves” (Jam. 1:21-22).  James is concerned with being a doer of the word and not just a hearer – in other words, he is concerned with hypocrisy.  But if you back up, you can see that it is just impossible to receive the word in the first place unless and until you “lay apart all filthiness” – that is, sin in your life, and “rampant wickedness.”  It is only then that we can “receive with meekness the engrafted word.”

This is because sin deadens our affections to God.  It makes us careless about his truth.  We don’t just receive God’s word with the mind; we must receive it with the mind and the heart, with the intelligence and the affections.  But unmortified sin keeps us from doing that.  You cannot love God and sin; you cannot love God and the world.  As James will go on to say in the fourth chapter, “know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God” 4:4).  Unmortified sin deadens our appreciation for the love of God in Christ.  It makes us so that we don’t hate sin and so we can’t really understand the meaning of the sacrifice of Christ for us that saves us from that sin.  Christ is no longer precious to us.  Our spiritual tastebuds have been deadened; we can no longer taste and see that the Lord is good.  And so all that is left is appearance.  Unmortified sin is like a cavity on the soul that eats out the soul and root of true religion.  All that’s left is a shell of outward performance.  With our lips we praise God when our hearts are far from him (Mt. 15:8).  

Unmortified sin not only eviscerates true heart religion; it is far worse than that because it makes us blind to our own sin and the damage it is creating in our lives.  We just can’t see how it can be so bad when we love it so much.    Unmortified sin grieves the Holy Spirit (cf. Eph. 4:30), who is the only one who enable us to successfully turn from the sin in our lives (Rom. 8:13).  The removal of his influence which follows is like Samson losing his hair: we are more exposed to the wiles of the devil.  Beware of unmortified sin in your life!

Hypocrisy is a symptom of pride in the heart.

Hypocrites inevitably fall.  When they fall, the fall is often very great.  But it is often the case that even in the greatest of falls, people don’t see it coming.  Even wise men can be fooled by the hypocrisy of others.  But it is also often the case that you can look back and see things that, in light of the fall, now appear to point to it.  I think the same thing is true of this text.  As I said before, there is nothing in verses 17-20 that is bad, and much about it that is good.  However, once you read these verses in light of the ones that follow (21-23), they start looking different, don’t they?  In retrospect, I think there is the appearance of pride here.  Their resting, their boasting, their confidence – in such people, these are not godly attitudes but ones of pride.  In fact, I think it would be safe to say that pride is a root cause in every case of hypocrisy.

Pride is evil.  It is an abomination to God because at the heart of pride is the attitude that I know better than God.  And it gives us a wrong sense of safety, of self-assuredness, that I have arrived, that I can do no wrong.  As Lloyd-Jones put it in a sermon on this text, the hypocrite is on very good terms with himself!  And so they become reckless.  They stop being careful and vigilant over their hearts.  It leaves them vulnerable because it keeps them from being willing to listen to others.  Brothers and sisters: beware of pride!  It is not for no reason that the greatest sermon ever preached, the Sermon on the Mount, begins with the words, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God” (Mt. 5:3).

The Remedy for Hypocrisy

Understanding the roots of hypocrisy is the key the finding the remedy, isn’t it?  If loving the praise of men is a root cause of hypocrisy, then loving God and walking before him is the antidote.  We need to die to the passion to be praised by others.  We need to die to the need to be noticed by men.  We need to die to the craving to be congratulated by people.  Instead, we need to cultivate the attitude of Psalm 139: “Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting” (23-24).  I think of the contrast to the love of the praise of men reflected in guys like Nehemiah, who, though he was constantly attacked and ridiculed and despised by other leaders both in his own nation and in those around him, he was able to courageously follow God because he was the only one he was out to please: “Remember me, O my God, for good” (Neh. 13:31).

The real test for genuine spirituality is not what people think of us.  It’s what God thinks of us.  And appreciating that reality is impossible unless you have true faith that believes that God is and that he is the rewarder of those who diligently seek him (Heb. 11:6).  Do we actually live that way?  Do we live before God?  Is his approval the thing that we are after?  Are his promises the reward we are banking our lives on?  It is just impossible to be a hypocrite and live this way.  Walk before God with your whole heart and you won’t be a hypocrite.  Don’t live for the eye of men; live to please God.  Don’t judge your spirituality by what men think of you; judge yourself by the standard of Scripture.

And also if unmortified sin is a root cause of hypocrisy, then should we not be on a constant mission to kill all the sins in our lives?  Should we not spare any precious sin?  Should we not want to lay aside every weight and the sin that so easily besets us so that we may run with patience the race that is set before us (Heb. 12:1-2)?  Should we not avoid every form of evil (1 Thess. 5:22)?  Should we not set ourselves to discover the root causes of our sins and chase them down to the bottom?  Should we not be content with little effort to repent, but bend every spiritual muscle and spare no effort to do it?  Should we not be willing to do whatever it takes to kill the sin in our lives (cf. Mt. 5:29-20)?

And should we not pursue humility instead of pride?  Should we not pray that God would create in us a lowly heart that bows before his word?  Should we not humble ourselves in the sight of the Lord that he may lift us up?

But, though we should do all this and more, we must never forget that the purpose of exposing our hypocrisy is to turn us to Christ.  This is Paul’s point in Romans.  He is helping us to see the reality of our sinfulness so that we will see the sufficiency of Christ to save.  We need to be saved from ourselves, and the message of the gospel is that Jesus Christ is the only one who can do that for us.  What does this mean?  Well, first of all, it means that we must understand who Jesus is.  We must understand that Jesus is not just another prophet or preacher.  He is first and foremost the Son of God who shares fully and equally and eternally with God the Father and the Spirit in the nature of God.  And he is the son of man, and as a son of man he shares fully in the nature of man.  He is the incarnate God; he is the God-man who tabernacled among us: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. … And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth” (Jn. 1:1-3, 14).

We need someone who can save us from our sins; we need someone who can save us from its guilt and its grip.  Jesus can do that.  He came to save us from sin by standing in the place of sinners before God and as the Lamb of God, dying in our place and taking the punishment of our sins that we deserve.  As man, he could genuinely take our place.  As God, he could completely pay the penalty demanded by the sins of all whom the Father gave him to save.  There is no one else who can do this.  There is no other name under heaven given among men, by which we must be saved (Acts 4:12).  

Jesus is the one who will save his people from their sins (Mt. 1:21).  Jesus is Lord and Savior.  He is our Prophet who reveals God’s word and will to us.  He is our Priest who reconciles us to God.  He is our King who rules over us and defends us, and who will conquer all his and our enemies. 

So let us come to Christ.  Let us turn from our sins and turn to the only one who can save us from our sins.  Let us come because our Lord himself said that all who come to him he will never cast away (Jn. 6:37).  Let us come to him, not trusting in our own merit or goodness or works or achievements.  Let us come to him, trusting in his grace to cleanse us from sin’s guilt and power, receiving him as our Lord and our Savior.

And let’s keep coming to him.  The life of the Christian is not one of coming to Christ and then making it the rest of the way on our own.  We need daily cleansing and daily grace.  We live by faith in the Son of God who loved us and gave his life for us (Gal. 2:20).  It is the joy of fellowship and friendship with God through Christ that is the ultimate reason why we don’t fall for the easy but cheap way of hypocrisy.  Hypocritical religion is like ceramic fruit.  It may look very real but it is totally unsatisfying.  Only those who are walking in the light of Christ can have their joy made full through fellowship with God.  May we truly know the joy of walking in the light of the Lord.