He Who is Without Sin. . .
May 4, 2009 by Standing on Truth
Filed under Culture
There is something that has been frustrating me for quite a while, and it never really came to my full attention until news of Mel Gibson’s divorce made it to some of the critics in the media. As most of us know, Mel Gibson and his wife, Robyn, are divorcing after 28 years of marriage. Apparently, for many, this is an opportunity to pull the “hypocrite” card. Newsweek has written a blurb about it and entitled it, “Gibson’s Unholy Divorce,” in which they remind Mr. Gibson about a Bible passage in Malachi where God says that he hates divorce.
Now, I understand that there are some that want to hate on Christians no matter the topic of discussion. They just need a forum for it. I also understand that God does ask us to hold ourselves to a standard, and in part, because as I’ve once heard said, “We are the only Bible that some people will read.” I get that. But what frustrates me is when people who hold themselves to very little or no standard of righteousness or morality (and are not seeking one) feel so free and unashamed to aggressively and with no compassion point a very angry, “I-told-you-so” finger at those of us who strive for the highest standard of righteousness and morality (God’s) and fail. We all will fail at times. The Bible says, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). Not some, and certainly not just the born again Christians. Whether you believe in God or not, his truth applies to you. It’s probably quite easy to never “fail” in your own eyes or in the eyes of Hollywood (where a lot of this criticism comes from) if you have a weak or no standard of right and wrong for yourself. After all, how can you be considered a “hypocrite” when you have no beliefs to fail to walk out?
I am not defending Mel Gibson by any means. God does hate divorce, yes, but I have no insight into the details of Gibson’s divorce beyond the 2 minute segments here and there I hear on cable news. He may have done reprehensible things, giving his wife every biblical reason to file for divorce. Or he may have done very little, and his wife simply gave up on her commitment. We cannot know who is wrong in this situation, or exactly how much blame is deserved. But my thought is that the blame should not come from those who don’t even require a biblical moral standard of themselves. Furthermore, I think those of us who are Catholic or born again Christian should not cast a stone at Mr. Gibson either. What he is doing is between him, God, his wife, and whatever accountability partners to whom he has given access to his private life. The Bible says, “He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone” (John 8:7).
I feel the same way about the attacks that were so despicable and frequent against Sarah Palin and her daughter’s pregnancy out of wedlock. If the Palin family didn’t have the standards that they had, if they weren’t a Christian family, would there have been such slander? Or William Bennett’s gambling addiction several years ago–I remember a co-worker commenting about, in quite a haughty manner and with a smirk on her face, how the man who is all about integrity and character (his book, The Book of Virtues) is now a hypocrite.
Again, it sure is easy to live an amoral or immoral life. When you commit a sin, you can simply claim you are right in line with your beliefs anyway, so there can be no hypocrisy. But when you hold the Bible and Jesus Christ (who was perfect) as your standard of behavior, and strive for it every day as an act of obedience and love to your Savior, and then inevitably fail in big or small ways, somehow we become cow dung, fodder for criticism and labeled hypocrite.
Does that seem right?
