Recently, while surfing the radio stations on the way to work, I listened in for a few minutes to one of the many religious broadcasts that can be heard here. I'll do this sometimes, just for a chuckle.
When I chanced upon it this time, a serious-voiced man was talking about hypocrisy. He spoke of divisions in the religious ranks: the rifts in the clergy, the chasms between priest and congregation. He talked of how many Christians don't live by Christian ethics, how they don't practice what they preach, so to speak.
This intrigued me, since it's not often you hear a Christian saying such things. He went on to talk of those "unsaved" who don't listen to the word of God because of the visible hypocrisy of some Christians. I don't know how widespread that is… I've never known anyone who fell into that category. Most of the "unsaved" I've known in my time are "unsaved" because they think the "word of God" is a bunch of hooey. But that's neither here nor there.
The part that induced the chuckle went like this: After calling a bunch of Christians hypocrites, the man went on to address the "unsaved." We shouldn't, he claimed, allow the actions of the hypocrites to turn us away from salvation. We should accept Christ, and rest assured that we would never find any hypocrisy within Him.
I burst out laughing. I really did. I mean, come on! The New Testament shows many examples of Jesus being a "do as I say, not as I do" kind of guy. He condemned anger as being wrong, yet displayed his own on numerous occasions. He spoke highly of honesty, yet often told half-truths and sometimes even outright lies.
It's possible that the radio person, as well as many others, might come forth with "explanations" of these contradictory words and actions. They'll speak of "righteous anger," whatever that's supposed to mean. And they'll insist that Jesus' non-truths were parables or something.
Rubbish.
The fact is that the many authors of the books of the Bible weren't real concerned with consistency. It's one of many, many aspects of the book that reveals it to be a patchwork of fiction, no closer to the truth than the words of Rush Limbaugh.
I wonder, sometimes, how closely many Christians read their holy book. That goes for people like the radio guy, too. I suspect that most Christians read only the passages they're told to read, or gloss over passages that don't fit in with how they perceive the Bible and its characters to be.
And in a way, that's hypocrisy, too. For if they really read the book, they'd see it for what it is. They'd see that their idolized Christ isn't very worthy of the adulation. They'd see that their God is a monster.
They'd see the truth.
