"Let's take
advantage of God," a conspiracy springs up in the mind of the
reasonably seasoned believer. He gingerly vocalizes this heretic thought as his
lips tremble. And he waits and waits for the divine wrath. He waits but nothing
happens. He is not struck dead like the way Uzzah was struck dead when he
touched the ark or when Onan masturbated onto the ground.
That emboldens his heart and the believer wavers a little.
He wavers in his faith. He thinks he
can get away with it. He thinks maybe he could
stay hidden in God's blind spots. Laboring under this belief, he returns to the
thought of taking advantage of a loving God like a husband would cheat on his
devoted wife or a teacher would abuse a besotted student.
The believer now gets bolder and he digs deeper into this
dark conspiracy. He becomes less flippant about it. He takes the first step in
the plan. His plan would involve faithfully going to church no doubt. For there
is no better way to lay low than to lay
close to the source of his faith.
For the plan to work, he knows he has to be subtle,
nuanced and quiet. He needs to blend. He cannot openly exploit without arousing
attention. He cannot take advantage of God so publicly without being the
receiving end of a pastoral rebuke.
He does not want to be singled out as a hypocrite. That
would be a big spoiler for his plan. He knows a hypocrite has no credibility
and his plan needs credibility as the currency to make his new persona
believable.
Still, he knows somehow that he is beginning to turn out as a hypocrite. But that has to be one arising in undefined form out of gradually
unfolding circumstances and not by conscious personal design. He has to deny
this duplicity so as to avoid distancing his integrity. This is of course
a fine dividing line to make but it is one he needs to make if he
wants to take advantage of God without the guilt and the self-condemnation. His rationale is this,
"If a little oil is needed to grease
the
wheels, then a little denial of hypocrisy is needed to grease the faith."
So, the believer will keep up the appearances while he
exploits the lover of his soul. His inveterate self with its umbilical cord
still attached to the fallen nature will take liberties with God one sin at a
time. Under the self-denied tent of duplicity, he steels his resolve to live a
life that is more Christ-less than it is Christ-like, and in all
public acts, he endeavors to project the fullness of his Savior.
He knows he can get away with it because the new covenant
is a
covenant of unconditional love and instantaneous absolution. In fact, the
balm of forgiveness that eases his conscience is the same balm that frees him
to act with divine impunity.
Not one day goes by without the believer thanking the
divine grace for its unreserved generosity. And while he initially feels the
deep moving remorse to transform for God, he soon takes this soft side for
granted like all doted children unfailingly do and turn His generosity into a
calculated self-serving affair. His faith
progressively becomes more extractive
rather than inclusive and he gets more
out of it than what he puts into it.
Of course not all believers will follow this path of an
unconscious hypocrite but as it stands, the temptation is made far easier and
even more accessible by the way the divine Creator is projected in this day and
age. The believer knows the salvational “bait” that hides the Calvary “hook” is not so much about embarking on a self-denying journey to personal sanctification after
the altar-call
justification.
On the contrary, it is now more about putting the
"justification" wheelcart before the "sanctification" horse
and to live out in this perversely reversal of priorities in the natural order of things. As such, the
believer has found a short-cut to the journey of sanctification. It is
a truncated road of personal convenience coupled with a pragmatic sense of
public devotion and reverence. The appearances will still have to be kept but
only as a means to a self-exalted end.
In other words, there is still conviction of sins in
him
but such conviction is no more than just a license to sin a little more boldly each
time absolution is readily granted when requested. This form of confession is
nothing more than a confession of form and not of substance and what is dealt
with in such a confession is the sin and not the sinner.
As an unfortunate result, the hypocrite gets a free pass
while the practice of hypocrisy is momentarily arrested. But as the
practitioner is still very much alive to his unregenerated nature,
drawing from
it the defiance to rebel, his remorse does not nail his flesh to the Cross. It
merely places it on the bloody stake with a slap on the wrist of light
admonishment.
Given time, the believer will readily return to his
condemned form since such return is no more inconvenient to him than a murderer
finding his way back to the murder weapon he had once discarded in a moment of
feel-good guilt.
So, "let's take
advantage of God" is the enslaved melody of a believer who thinks
he
can get away with it all. He relishes this ability to worship his Creator
in the open marketplace of faith and to perpetuate his iniquities in the
shadow market of doubt. No doubt there is still redemption hope for him in the
long journey of life and faith. But this hope will never see the light of day
as long as the deluded believer still thinks that he can take advantage of a
loving and gracious God this side of heaven. Cheerz
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