Faux Outrage

When the Amoral Profess Morality

The amoral brigade regularly festoons itself with faux outrage.  We have in mind occasions when Christians are exposed as having been engaged in sinful practices, sometimes extremely bad ones. 

The Christian position on such travesties is sound, sure, and consistent.  The Christian Gospel teaches that all men, all men, are totally depraved--by which we mean that the thoughts and intents of the heart are evil.  So it is not unexpected that from time to time professing Christians fall into sin once again.

The amoral brigade shrieks, "Hypocrisy!".    No--hypocrisy would be if the lapsed believer and the Christian Church attempted to justify, explain away, excuse, or in any other way deny the evil and sinfulness of the person's actions.  After all, we believe that Peter--an apostle, no less--publicly denied the Lord thrice, despite the fact that he had heard the solemn utterance of our Lord that the one who denied the Christ before men would be denied by that same Christ before His heavenly Father.
 

It is salutary that the disciples did not gather round shouting, "Hypocrit".  Nor did our risen Lord.  Rather, he restored him to Himself and to the office of an apostle, forgiving his sin.  He had already borne the full penalty for the sin of Peter's denial upon the Cross. 

We come from a long line of public sinners--who have sinned in office and in private life: Abraham's lies over his wife Sarah, Noah's drunkenness, Moses's anger, David's adultery and murder, Eli's indulgence of his wicked sons--we could go on for a long time.  But most of these people were dealt with by God, humbled, granted the grace of repentance, and were restored.  This is not hypocrisy.  It is human reality.  It is the Gospel in action. 

The real hypocrisy is the faux outrage of the amoral.  These folk celebrate homosexuality, licentiousness, greed, covetousness, lying, fraud, drunkenness, theft, gossip, slander, adultery, blasphemy, cursing and pretty much every other kind of human evil.  For them morality is just a matter of personal preference.  If you should happen to change your preferences, so be it.  What's sauce for the goose may well be poison for the gander--and that's just fine.  It's all an expression of genes and evolutionary conditioning. 

What we find contradictory and truly hypocritical is that these folk express moral indignation at the lapsed Christian.  If they truly believed what they daily profess they would welcome and celebrate the lapsed.  "You have become like one of us," they would say.  Consequently, their outrage is actually false.  But it does betray their stated beliefs as untrue to their own hearts.  They demonstrate they have the law of God written on their hearts, as indeed the Scripture declares.  They demonstrate their own guilt by continuing to live as amoral persons, despite knowing the truth and the law and their own depravity.

By their faux outrage, the amoral condemn themselves.  They heap up more guilt upon their heads.  Even as they stand condemning the lapsed Christian, they heap up guilt upon their own heads, because they betray the truth: they know that such things are wrong.  They know that their amorality is perverse.  They know their own guilt before a holy God.