Virtue and Reward

 Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven.  Thus, when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward.  But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you. -- Matthew 6:1-4

I have always thought of virtue as something that God approves of, perhaps even something He has led me to do.  The Lord enables and empowers us to act righteously, and He often gives us opportunities to exercise virtue, to meet the needs of those around us.  

Virtue does not require consensus.  All the right people don't have to agree about what is good.  Not in God's universe -- maybe it's different over in the twitterverse.  I don't know.  

Jesus tells us here that we should not seek to curry favor with the public by our acts of righteousness.  We should keep them quiet, and do good, as much as possible, privately.  Do good out of humility.  Pride is always something we have to guard against.  As the  Lord told Cain, "[I]f you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door.  Its desire is contrary to you, but you must rule over it" (Genesis 4:7).  Pride is the foundational sin, and it can be subtle, insidious, lurking.  I'll be doing all right and suddenly find myself thinking that I really am something, after all.  

Keeping our virtue quiet is one way to avoid having other people brag on us and inflate our sense of worth.  Not that you shouldn't have a sense of worth, it should just be based, not on works, but on the love Christ has for us made manifest in the Cross.  

And, in light of the Cross and all that has been done for me, to what do my acts of righteousness amount?

Burn, Baby, Burn

The fear of the LORD is hatred of evil.  Pride and arrogance and the way of evil and perverted speech I hate.  -- Proverbs 8:13

We are born with the capacity to hate.  Contrary to what the utopians believe, people are not taught to hate, only what to hate.  Nor do most of us have to learn to sin.  It comes naturally.  Without discipline children are likely to remain self-centered and concerned only with having their own needs met by any means possible.  Good parents are those who reflect the Divine Nature as the Moon reflects the Sun.  They teach their children to be respectful of them and of the boundaries they set based on their greater wisdom and experience.  The typical television show or “family” movie these days is quite likely to attack that perspective and depict children as being born wiser, more intelligent, talented and “true to themselves” than their parents.  If you doubt that media and entertainment have an impact on worldviews, take a walk around a retail store or mall sometime and see all the little dictators running their parents like slaves.

Whether hatred is sin depends upon its object.  Sometimes hatred is merely a matter of misunderstanding or the culmination of bad experiences – as the lady I knew who had to go to therapy because she hated Hindus.  She was an apartment manager and rented places to a lot of Indians on H1Bs.  They weren’t all accustomed to Western ways and were slow to adjust to the culture and environment.  This caused her great stress to the point that she nearly became physically violent toward some of them.   

Hatred of evil, however, is allowed to burn white hot within us because our God who is a consuming fire hates evil as well.  There is no need to hate the person who does evil.  I would have to start by hating myself.  Rather I am to hate the wickedness that I do or that I might do, that would lead me to deny or attempt to deceive God.  We can read in Romans 7:15, I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.  God warned Cain from the very beginning that … sin is crouching at the door.  Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it.

I wrote sometime back about how perfect love casts out fear (1 John 4:18).  What the righteous fear is not God Himself but the violation of His edicts and laws.  We are to have a respect for the infinite wisdom and understanding of the Lord as wise children.  Because we are tempted and sometimes seduced by evil to cross these lines, we hate it.  Evil, like a creeping serpent, like a predator lying in wait, is always right there with us, even in our best moments.  Why would we not despise and hold in utter contempt such a deceptive and destructive thing?  It is a principle of this material existence more relentless than gravity and only our ultimate salvation and glorification in Christ will us free of it.  Meanwhile, we must beware, for … I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand.

Fig leaves and Spiderwebs

But the LORD God called to the man, “Where are you?” – Genesis 3:9

Did the Lord need to ask this question? We could see this as the Divine Parent addressing the misbehaving child with a rhetorical, “What have you done?” On one level, God calls man to become aware of his state, make his confession, and begin his return to right-standing. God needs to and does ask all of us this same question. Beyond that, however, sin creates what appears to be an impenetrable wall between God and man. In some sense, apart from Christ, man is hidden from his Creator.

God cannot “see through” sin. He does not lack the power, but it runs across the grain of His Being. It is like interference. Sin always involves some kind of deception. To deceive is to hide or obscure truth in some manner. If we think about it, the whole idea that we will tell people things we ourselves do not believe or that we know to be untrue is rather fantastic. That deception can at times appear the wise or reasonable path shows us how twisted we are. Most of us do not approve of being lied to, but we have fewer qualms about lying to others – from the peace-keeping “No, Honey, your butt doesn’t look big” to the desperate “Who are you going to believe? Me, or your lying eyes.” Hiding behind falsehood is almost the definition of humanity.

If there is any flaw in The Screwtape Letters, it is that ol’ Screwtape seems to reveal more than a devil should, even among his colleagues. Lewis was aware of this, but he had to pull the curtain back a little. To tell the truth in the negative you still have to tell the truth. In his foreword, Lewis described what he wanted to avoid: But the really pernicious image is Goethe’s Mephistopheles. It is Faust, not he, who really exhibits the ruthless, sleepless, unsmiling concentration upon self which is the mark of Hell. The humorous, civilized, sensible, adaptable Mephistopheles has helped to strengthen the illusion that evil is liberating.

Far from liberating us, evil is a lock that disguises itself as a key, a predator that looks like prey. Evil hides by its very nature, and the follower of evil is swallowed up and hidden within sin’s dark belly. We recall God’s words to Cain: If you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it.. Deception is pictured as a wild beast that will turn on and devour its master if we fail to keep it beaten down.

It is not that God does not see evil taking place. Our sins are not hidden from Him. No one is getting away with anything in the dark. Rather, because the sinner is cloaked in sin, God no longer sees His own image and likeness. He does not rain down judgment upon man but upon sin. Of course, if one is “in sin” when the smack-down comes, the effect is pretty much the same.

The one Man of whom the Father never lost sight was the Son – not until the Cross when the Son was enveloped by the darkness of the sin of all humanity. Christ’s obedience and perfect righteousness, even when engulfed by evil, shattered the big lie once and for all. Sin was turned inside out. And sin's captives were set free -- dumped out like reprieved kittens from a tow sack.

Sin no longer hides us from God. We need no longer take sin as a covering for our nakedness: Their cobwebs are useless for clothing; they cannot cover themselves with what they make. As Paul said, …[W]e do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. We are clothed with Christ and hidden in Him.