Why Hypocrisy?

Why Hypocrisy and Not With the Whole Heart!

This — being «whole-hearted» — is a quality God earnestly desires in a person's relationship with Him, after seeking God and after supposing one has found Him. What does this state of being whole-hearted mean? How is a person to know whether they serve and believe in God with their whole heart, or quite the opposite? If only there were some kind of meter we could hold to our hearts, to measure and understand how whole our heart is at that moment! Of course there is no such thing, but there is One who sees it: God. And it is something we ourselves must surely see, and strive to see.

If we think of a round cake and cut it down the middle, what do we say? We say we divided the cake in two. We can divide this cake into many pieces like this. Our heart, too, can be likened to this. For the values we hold above all else, we divide our heart. For example, we occupy and divide our heart, allotting one part to our pleasures and hobbies, one part to the effort of acquiring goods and property, one part to our children, to beauty, to those of the opposite sex, to our car, to eating and drinking, to our furniture, or to making a career, to our worries, to our poverty, to our illnesses and so on. If there is still a little room left, perhaps we allot that leftover part to God too, under the name of worship — in whatever form, according to the countries and religions we happen to belong to, doing it as if it were a duty. The more all these and similar things occupy our heart, the more we have bound our heart to those things, the more we have divided our heart into pieces. But our Creator definitely wants us to draw near to Him with a whole, wholly undivided heart.

If we want to remain in a good relationship with our Creator, we must be able to say, as His servant David said:

“O God, examine me and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts. And see if there is any way of wickedness in me.” (Psalms 139:23-24)

In fact, having exactly such an attitude of heart ought to be unavoidable for our salvation. How many people do you know who would dare to pray like this? In your view, how many people could say to God, “know my heart, test me”? And you yourself? People cannot even bear to hear that God has the quality of seeing everything. There are not a few who even say, “If God sees everything, then I will not believe in such a God.” And some, while having no doubt that the God they say they believe in sees everything, live and think and act and speak as though that God they believe in sees nothing. Or if He sees, He sees everyone — but not that one person!

When we read these words, sometimes we immediately object. What then, are we not to work at all, not to eat, not to have fun? If our hearts become divided by the examples listed above, and if God therefore blames us, then let us not even live at all. For every person does these and similar things.

This is precisely the matter we need to understand. If we cannot see and grasp this difference, it means these words will have no meaning for us. If I illustrate with a verse why God wants us to come to Him with the whole heart, perhaps it will be easier for me to explain the subject. Let us see, then: by doing the things I mentioned above, is our heart always divided, or is it not?

In the Matthew section of the Gospel, Jesus, while speaking of the last days, warned: “As the days of Noah were, so also will be the coming of the Son of Man (Jesus). For in the days before the flood, until the day Noah entered the ark, people were eating and drinking, marrying and being given in marriage; and just as they knew nothing until the flood came and took them all away, so also will be the coming of the Son of Man.” (Matthew 24:37-39)

Now we may ask ourselves this: “I had heard that in the time of the prophet Noah God destroyed all who lived on the earth because of their sins; but if Jesus said this, what did He mean? For if, regarding the last days or the days of Noah, Jesus had used examples like ‘people are wicked, violent, immoral, lovers of self and money above all, murderers, slanderers, thieves, unable to master their desires…’, then I would understand. But He spoke of people ‘eating, drinking, marrying and being given in marriage.’ What is wrong with these, or why should they be a sin?” — such questions may nag at our minds.

Yes, in fact eating, drinking and marrying are not sins. God gave us humans these qualities in the first place. But if we allot our whole mind and heart only to these things, and care nothing for such matters as what God's purpose concerning us is, why He will bring an end, what He expects of me as a human — then it means we give no place to those things in our heart. In short, whatever we give priority and first place to in our heart, whatever we hold as most important in the foreground apart from God's will — that is what is not right. Of course we will eat, drink and marry. But if we hold these above all else and give them the foremost place rather than God's will, then it becomes wrong. Because Jesus knew this, He used this example concerning the last days. It is a very fitting example for our time. Unfortunately people think only of these things. Even if everything is in their minds, God is not there, nor any knowledge of His purpose. These subjects seem very boring to them. In fact, because of the bit of comfort they possess, most people can even say, “I have no need of God.” In our time, such insolence is no longer even regarded as shameful. For them, God is as if someone who keeps people from every kind of happiness, who draws boundaries — a punishing, tiresome being.

But alongside all these, are there not religious people? That is, is all of humanity always far from God? Religion's hand and tongue have always been very long! A Christian world of nearly 2.3 billion, a Muslim world of 1.4 billion, Hindus more or less than 889 million, and what else there is on our earth. (*According to a 2009 report the world population is 6.790 billion people. CIA (ed.) 2009 – Wikipedia –) All of them say they believe in God. Many go to death for this cause without blinking. But when you go among them, with exceptions, none of them either live the words of the book they believe in, in their lives, or take the trouble to learn them. Quite the opposite: those of them who have learned and read have, with fanatical, loveless, hypocritical, conceited or falsely humble attitudes, gotten into the blood of billions of people. Whereas our Creator clearly says:

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.” (Gospel — Mark 12:30-31)

Frankly, with these verses God indicates that He does not like a half-hearted relationship, and that He will never accept us with hypocrisy. However much these religions, because of their deceitful attitudes, do not enjoy such sympathy among these societies in our time, they are the ones responsible for our present immoral, perverse, suffering-filled world. Religion and the religious did not make the true God known to us, humanity. With fairy tales and perverse stories they strove always to enslave humanity to themselves. They crowned dictators and saluted them according to those dictators. They not only collaborated with politicians; they themselves did politics and secured seats by using the name of God. They crushed people. To the sheep they herded and ought to have protected, they gave nothing spiritually. They brought only death, hatred, genocide, want, division. For, as Jesus also said, all of them are wolves that come in sheep's clothing but are in fact ravening. For those who doubt which of these is right and which wrong, Jesus gives a very definite example:

“So every good tree bears good fruit, but the rotten tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a rotten tree bear good fruit…. So then, you will know them by their fruits. Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of the heavens; but he who does the will of my Father (God) who is in the heavens.” (Matthew 7:17-21)

Do these religious people not know that all this is so? The First and Second World Wars took place mostly among the Christian world. While priests, with the Holy Scripture in their hands, prayed to God to bless the soldiers who would go to the front the next day; that same evening, a priest of another country considered the enemy, with the same book, in another church, with a similar blessing prayer, begged God for his own soldiers to kill and destroy the other side! Even though in the book in their hands they read:

“Love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father who is in the heavens”! (Matthew 5:43-45)

What is to be called of these prayers? I call it hypocrisy; if you know a better word, say it.

Imagine you come home, and from inside a scream cries out: “Mother, father, help me kill my sibling!” You look, and it is a dreadful scene: two siblings grappling, one beneath, the other on top, one with a knife in hand just about to thrust it, but lacking the strength, struggling, and for this he wants your help! Both shout the same way: “Father, help me, help me so I can kill.” Which one do you help? Do you say, “What an absurd thing — neither of them”? This is exactly the kind of absurd thing these religious people did. They pushed millions to death. For their interests, their gains, because they were afraid. These prayers came not from the book in their hands but from the corruption in their hearts. Were these hearts of theirs whole before God? We say “no.” And God was disgusted by what they did. Well then, did these people learn a lesson from these past events? Look at our world, and give the answer yourself.

Our aim is not to draw ourselves aside and blame others. It is to learn a lesson from others' faults and not do the same. For if, in the events we have spoken of, we first see ourselves, examine ourselves, and build ourselves up to do what is good like the prophet David; if we seek God with a wholly undivided heart, unconditionally; then in this time of ours, when at any moment what will happen is uncertain, you may be sure that we will find the true God. For it is written: “For God seeks those who worship Him in spirit and in truth.” (The Gospel, the John section, verses 4:6-26)

With this short writing, I wanted to encourage you to take up the Holy Scriptures known as the Torah, the Psalms, the Gospel and the Quran, and by all means begin to read them.